Old and New Net
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Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
This video from Kate Ray quickly made the rounds.
What a long way the net has come. I suppose it necessary but gratuitous to add: ‘for better and for worse.’
There’s a moment in this interesting mash-up where the speaker implies the following: could we re-render human brain to think more like a machine? This follows from the difficulty of making a machine think like a human.
I had to look up the use of the term ontologies because I know little about information science, and, the its use in the video seemed to depart from the philosophical term. Here’s the treatment about ontologies at wikipedia.
There is nothing about the problems faced by the varieties of user. I’m a user and I know of the problems I encounter in searching for information, both on the internet, in libraries, and, on my own computer, in my own archive of documents.
I’ll mention three challenges. I’ll frame this by stating that I wish my computer-based archives and library archives were indexed by google.
(1) usually, (my) searches for information on google are satisfied. However, because the results are matched with the real-time indexing my cognition provides for, the end of a search on a given topic–usually in the social sciences–is arbitrarily terminated. In other words, I have conclusive idea that a given result is the optimum result. I’d also characterize my search methods using partly ad hoc heuristics.
(2) searches in my computer-based archive are brute force and leverage Spotlite’s ability to look into the text of every file, BUT, involve scanning through very long result lists, most of which are not positive. As a user, the labor intensive task of organizing files on my end is, ‘too much.’ And, fit to this is the ease with which information can be archived versus the labor involved in organizing it. Somewhat: the intuitive’s curse…
(3) The most difficult search of the web and internet resources are those that are very particular and very local. A good example would be somebody’s address. Searches oriented to topics do not fall into this category.
One other note–I would guess my own search capability falls into the highly capable slice of any Bell Curve. This guess is based in my understanding of how to use the specific editing features of google search. And, it’s based on observing how most other people use search. One of the challenges for the semantic web, given,
The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information on the web is defined, making it possible for machines to process it.
is any useful, more powerful interface and facilitation, has to meet the different modes of differentiated users.
For example, I wouldn’t be skeptical of a machine’s ability to qualify results so that I could be confident I’ve reached the optimum set of results, but I’d like to know beforehand why I needn’t be skeptical. And, this would have to be presented to me at my level.


