The Next Step Toward a Semantic Web?

While considering the successes and failures of a technology, it often helps to step back and look at how individuals solve information problems on their own, informally and with minimal technological support.

When I want to educate myself regarding a topic, my first step is to find a place where interested people congregate (it could be a mailing list, if I am doing my research in virtual mode) or a collection of useful documents. When I find people who impress me with their insights or who simply intrigue me with their points of view, I spend more time reading what they have to say and ask them for pointers to new material.

This technique uses affinity between individuals, as collaborative filtering does, but the individuals are actively seeking affinity rather than passively waiting for it to emerge from a collaborative filtering system.

Furthermore, once I know someone's interested in a topic, I tend to forward that person URLs or mail messages that I think will be valuable. This again is an active filtering system. It helps extend a past interest to future topics.

Most subtle, perhaps, is the way I discover new topics of importance by following what interests the people I respect. For instance, if I learn from someone's views in a particular software area and find that he's becoming obsessed over some piece of hardware, I decide that it's time to look into that hardware. I don't simply screen out this new information because it's different from the software area that we've always talked about.

How can we take this informal "whither thou goest, I too shall go" system and use computers to make it more efficient or comprehensive? Improvements might be something as simple as enhancements to current mail filtering programs.

A mailer could check whose postings you mark as valuable (or save in special folders), and automatically elevate new postings by those people so that your likelihood of seeing each one is relative to your interest in the person posting. Such a system should be tuned somehow so that long-term posters don't have an unfair advantage in relation to new posters with interesting perspectives to offer.

People could maintain favorite bookmarks on various subjects and open these lists of bookmarks up to other people who flatter them with their interest. Technology could help by making it easier to rate and categorize documents. (So knowledge management comes back into the picture.)

Technology could also identify new topics that are interesting to interesting people. Currently, you might realize that someone's on to something potentially exciting because he keeps mentioning it on a weblog or because he explicitly tells you to take a look at it. Perhaps the notification could be aided by an automated agent that told you, "So-and-so mentioned OS X four times this month."

The potential for this new kind of Semantic Web calls for active exploration, not idle speculation. I do not know at this point what the successful technology is; I do not know who will design and promote it. But this much I know: I'd rather spend time filing my email and organizing my bookmarks than going back over 200 of my old articles and putting angle brackets around every keyword.