A __context icon__ is a visual way of remembering the contents of a page. It acts like a page-flag, but for individual wiki-pages rather than entire domains.
# How?
The thought here is to leverage the graphic power of Livecode to create these context icons as argument maps for a wiki-page.
The Federation Browser would contain an authoring tool that can read in a wiki-page, and generate a rich interactive context map - exporting these in a variety of fomats that wiki can use. This preserves the loose coupling of the federation, while enabling us to Explore the Future.
# Messaging
Another use of these images is as both cryptographic proof, and as a robust way to share knowledge in a (decentralised) messaging context.
This wiki sharing takes advantage of obfuscation as well as the beauty, utility and fun of sharing small graphic images, png's and animated gifs. Once you have the image, you should be able to find the relevant assets required for action based on the multi-hashes embedded in the format.
# Background
I first started looking into this, while working on the Medical Hypertext system I developed at Charing Cross Hospital. As the number of pages grew, I needed to find a way to remember and navigate better.
The two techniques I landed upon were: 1. Create a bi-directional Medical Dictionary 1. Graphviz Icons
The graphical icons would be derived from medical workflows where possible, things like treatment pathways. So if you wanted to visually remember a particular patient history (with regard to patient anonymity) a visual treatment pathway would be both useful for navigation purposes when enlarged, and sufficiently visually unique to form a memorable icon.
Later, while working on Liquid law, the idea was to represent organisational structure - for say a company, but also the Fluid Group structure that the smart contracts (Legal DSL) would create. This Organisational DNA could also be represented by these context icons.
# See also