"Web 2.0" is the buzz du jour in media
and technology circles, but when Radar Networks hired Igor to name its
revolutionary new personal and group information manager web application,
they were touting their product as "Web 3.0". What?
Web 3.0, AKA the Semantic Web, promises the next generation of web intelligence
and advanced data mining, connectivity, and meaning. As Wired explains
it, while Google may organize the universe of public information, Radar's
new service will organize your personal information:
Right now…your information resides in various locations on
your computer, on different applications around the web, and within
your multiple email accounts. To gather all your knowledge on a given
area would be quite a chore.
The mission of gathering all this information and "tying it all
together" led Igor to the perfect name for Radar's new kind of personal
and group information manager product: Twine. An elegant word for a deceptively
simple physical object, Twine also contains the verb form, meaning "to
twist together; intertwine; interweave." Wired continues:
Twine is a sort of knowledge management tool for the masses. Each
user's Twine home page is a sort of personal dashboard—its central feature
is a list of updates not unlike the Facebook News Feed—that allows
a user to import any memo, website, video, or photo from anywhere on
the desktop or internet. Twine then uses semantic web technology to
organize automatically all of your information by theme and then infer
what other information might also interest you.
While one can do this for private information, the shining hope for
the application is that groups can use it to collaborate on a project
or keep tabs on a certain subject of interest by each contributing
to a communal information bucket called—get this—"a
twine."
Tim O'Reilly, in his O'Reilly
Radar (no relation) blog, goes even deeper
into the nuts and bolts that make Twine tick (are you tallying the metaphors
here?):
Underlying twine is Radar's [Network's] semantic engine, trained to
do what is called entity extraction from documents. Put in plain language,
the semantic engine auto-tags each document, turning each entity into
what looks like a web link as well as a tag in the sidebar. Type a note
in twine, and it picks out all of the people, places, companies, books,
and other types of information contained in the note, separating them
out by type.
OK. So what, you say? The magic doesn't happen until you -- or a group
of people -- have collected a large set of documents. Now, you can use
the tags associated with any given document to pivot through everything
else your collection, or twine, contains about that tag.
… The key point is that because each entity in any of the documents
becomes a meaningful tag, that extracted meaning becomes a semantic layer
tying all of the documents together. What's more, twine has its own built-in
semantic taxonomy, based on concepts mined from wikipedia, and…can
make connections between documents using tags and concepts that are
not actually in the documents themselves.
For any of you who have ever joined a social network only to ask yourselves
afterwards, "Now what do I do with it?", your answer is finally
here: Twine!
