Semantic Web Part III: The Humanity
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote two pieces on Web 3.0: ‘Semantic Web Part I: The Data‘, which covered the way information on the Semantic Web differs from the way we currently access information, and ‘Semantic Web Part II: The Interface‘, which discussed the challenges of processing the extraordinary quantities of information made available through a data-driven framework.
Let’s assume that you’ve read the first two posts and agree with the following basic premises:
- The web of the future will offer information as data that can be manipulated in a virtually infinite number of ways. This may or may not be the RDF framework! But the amount of information and our ability to manipulate it will continue to grow exponentially.
- If people want to be able to elegantly access the richness of this vast realm of data, they will need a means of interacting with it that offers an optimum level of choice.
If you don’t agree with either of those two statements, please let me know below! If you do, though, it’s time to delve further into that second point: a means of interacting with it that offers an optimum level of choice. What this means is that we want people to have unlimited flexibility, accessible in a simple enough manner that people can get their heads around it.
This may sound pretty straightforward, but in reality it’s the next great challenge of the Internet. Remember in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there was that torture machine that showed you the infinite vastness of the universe and your own size relative to it? Fried people’s brains (except Zaphod Beeblebrox—he was just proven to be as great as he always thought he was).
The Web is its own universe, and our minds would likely collapse if we tried to perceive its vastness. Without a meaningful interface and a meaningful filter, we would be utterly lost in information overload. As any artist can tell you, the value of the work lies as much in what is left out as in what is kept in.
The word for what should be kept in and what should be left out is ‘relevance’, and there are nearly as many different approaches to relevance as there are websites. Some people use demographics. Some people use history. Some people use social tagging. Some use contextual recommendations.
VortexDNA’s approach is to use the humanity of the individual.
In reality, we carry our own filters everywhere we go. This can be shown objectively; for example, we can only see a small part of the light spectrum, and we can only hear a tiny fraction of sound waves. Of that tiny fragment that we are capable of perceiving, we only consciously register yet another fraction, and we remember a smaller portion still.
Those limitations on our perception and awareness are not negative things. They are highly necessary boundaries that allow us to process the world we live in. Without them, we would likely go insane.
Our inherent filters also extend to who we are as people. Why do birds of a feather flock together? Because they can all see each other; they’re all using the same filter. I don’t mean ’see’ literally, of course; I mean ‘understand’.
VortexDNA’s technology works with these filters mathematically and brings them online. The same filters that allow us to process the physical world that we live in without losing our minds can be applied to our webworlds.
The Semantic Web can offer a richness of information beyond what our minds are capable of digesting. We place boundaries on how much we can take in by using effective interfaces and external relevance systems. The next step is for us to become the filter, to allow us to see those parts of the Web most aligned with who we are.
Does this sound like a useful framework? Do you believe that you create the world around you? Or is it a bit too airy-fairy for you? Either way, I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts.
