Well? How does it work? It works by categorizing and presenting information in such a way that you actually fly (technically called "zoom") through an information "web" -- officially called a "space". One of the best spaces available is AllTheNews, from A&R. AllTheNews provides links + descriptions (called "items") to news articles all over the Internet. You'll see how, in the screen shots, there are several categories of information ("Hot Topics"), which I zoomed into to see more categories of information. There I decided to zoom into "Internet", followed by "Internet Software". I could then choose to keep zooming in further and further to narrow down my items, but instead I saw an item in the list box on the right which caught my eye, so I clicked on it. The description was the first few words of the linked article -- and, since it looked interesting, I double-clicked on it to launch my Web browser with the said article. Amazingly simple. Of course, everything is cross-linked in the information space; you see how there are links to other related categories under the category containers as I'm flying throughout the space -- and often to the right of a category container, there'll be links to related categories that you can zoom into. Remember, though, that when I'm talking about "links" to other categories, I really mean "mirrors" of a category somewhere else that you can zoom into. Plus, you can always zoom out until you find another category that would look interesting to zoom into. It sounds complicated, but, in reality, it's quite easy -- and fun!
Technical Information
On the surface, it all looks quite simple, but there's some sophisticated work going on in the background. A "space" is composed of what Perspecta calls "meta-tags" (in a format much like SGML or HTML) -- tags that contain information about their relationship to other tags. Various tags supply the information about the different categories of data, and other tags contain the data itself (such as item names and descriptions). This part of the "PerspectaView Content System" is actually very complicated, but I'm sure that Perspecta and/or third party companies will soon come out with tools to automate the creation of such spaces. This is the reason why there aren't a large number of spaces yet -- to hand-code such a complex database of information requires time that companies don't want to spend on a proprietary system until that system's market share is great enough.
Wrap Up
It's too early to tell whether this new method of handling information on the Internet will really take off. PerspectaView is only in beta, and creating information for the PerspectaView Content System hasn't been automated with easy-to-use tools yet. However, such a radical idea for taking care of the Internet information glut has never before been proposed, and this system just might take off because of its sheer ingeniousness. Personally, I haven't had so much fun and success looking for information on the Internet for a long time as I have had with PerspectaView -- and as long as other computer users agree with me, PerspectaView can't be beat.
