8.18.1 The Information Personae is centred around the use of public space as a means of sharing and exploring heterogeneous information throughout a community of users. The basic space is made up of three types of context providing components: 1) items; 2) actions; and 3) paths. These three components respectively encompass the notion of data, manipulation, and navigation. The entire space will be encoded in an structured format, most likely defined by the Extensible Markup Language (XML 1.0, 1997). [13] This will allow the data to be easily transmitted between a variety of platforms and have different rendering behaviours or styles applied to it. Additionally, research into the use of a human understandable language for the encoding of space will open up the possibility of the manipulation of space for the purpose of artistic expression and experimentation.

8.18.2 Let's imagine two participants exploring each other's Information Personae via a dynamically generated public space. The multidimensional mailing list, visualised for the second participant, was comprised of a collection of "items" (mail messages) within the public space. To the second participant, one particular item appeared as a glowing sphere, positioned within a the three dimensional space, while to the first user it appeared as line number eighty-two in a dynamically generated table on a Web page, listing out the contents of the same mailing list. Both participants navigate through and manipulate the same collection of items at the same time, but are in completely different modes of interaction. If the first participant stored the item within the IP and later reviewed it through the ASCII interface, a pure text description of the item and its location ("number 82, positioned in the rear of the current space") would be seen. [14] [top] Notes:

13. "XML 1.0 Proposed Specification. 1997." Editors: Tim Bray, Jean Paoli, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. http://www.w3c.org/TR/PR-xml-971208. [back]

14. Robert Nideffer has been focused on research of multiple ways of viewing information in the collaborative research project. See his essay: "Manufacturing Agency: Relationally Structuring Community In-formation." www.arts.ucsb.edu/AI_Society, or on the CD-ROM. [back]