By georeferencing, I'm refering to the general act of placing data at specific locations in space, not just the act of associating data with geographic locations. Examples of the former are the many attempts at using representational spaces to organize data, such as file folders in Windows or the desk and hallway approach of Magic Cap. A good example of the latter is being carried on at UCSB's Digital Alexandria project. The problem with representational spaces until now has been that real architectural spaces usually make for dreadful ways to access data.

Bush-Nelson links implemented in VRML overcome this by allowing meaningful navigation among the links regardless of their positions in space. Data can be georeferenced, but still navigable by association. VXML is a tool for allowing actual information architecture to occur, if that term is taken to literally mean the placing of information in space.

The substrate space that the data is referenced to can be either representational (as in the butterfly advironment example) or abstract (as in the surface chart example).

Another interesting aspect to VXML is the fate of the ad banner. The image above is of a VRML world created by the design firm Out Of The Blue. Its an example of what they call an Advironment. Trapping such a gorgeous, immersive piece of work inside an 100x400 pixel banner is a shame, and Mcubed provides a solution to this. With georeferenced Mcubed nodes and links, the data could be arrayed inside the Advironment world just as easily as that world could be included in a nodespace.

The main short term end-user benefits of VXML are the usability, visual impact, flexibility and extensability of the web and information spaces. But the main eventual benefit of this interface may be to interactive web community sites. Frustration with such sites was one of the main motivating factors for this work in the first place; I want to be able to annotate other people's comments, link them together, see the whole conversation and where the most interesting and most dense conversastions are happening. More details and a demo of how this might work is forthcoming.