Japanese version M ultimedia representations provide people with more room for creativity.
Creativity is exercised by finding new associations among existing objects.
Since nonsymbolic representations, such as image, video and sound, can be rich in semantics and may have multiple interpretations, people have much larger opportunities to be creative in representing information in multimedia than in simple textual representations. Each medium, for example, color, has long been studied and domain experts exist who knows theories and pragmatics of how to use colors appropriately. The environment also provides a community knowledge base which will be gradually evolved by users over a long period of time.