My favorite food is the humble Indian dish: Chaat. Thinking of chaat, itself reminds me of home and the venerable yogurt mix beloved across all of India. Chaat is primarily composed of potato pieces, crispy fried dough, gram bean, spices, onions, corainder (to name a few) and last but not least yogurt. It tastes spicy and savory, sweet and sour and is the mixture is just plain old delicious. While, I am supposed to write about the flavor of IST, you might inquire how chaat enters the equation. The flavor of IST, I believe, is similar to chaat. There is no one objective way to solving problems of the Information Age, and IST attempts to do so by introducing the mixture of the IST triangle (Thanks to Louise's blog for this link). Rather than solve problems by only using either a technological solution, a information-centric solution or a people sided solution why not use all three at the same time to come up with a better one. As an example, digital libraries are attempting to provide a solution to the address the infomation needs for academics. A computer science view would be to provide better ranking solutions and large databases. The IST approach would introduce subtler questions such as:
- How do I rank the articles subjectively such that rankings are dependent on the user?
- How can we visualize this information such that the user is able to satisfy his information need better?
Papri Chaat
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