When my former university professor and mentor Ed Leahy discussed the importance of GPS in relation to knowledge work in group chats with people discussing Doug Engelbart’s work I really didn’t understand the relevance to something physical and something purely information based.
Since Ed is someone I greatly respect but this sounded very odd, I had to have a few rounds of thinking about it. The first relevance became work on notion of a time browser and then I kind of forgot about it.
Recently though, the notion of a symbol space http://symbolspace.info has become important in my work and the notion of addressing has become front and centre. This is from Doug’s notions of high-resolution addressing and linking but I think that I also owe a debt of gratitude from Ed and his insistence of the importance of addressing :-)