LAME DUCKS

AND

FLYING DOGS

Information in the digital era

……. (and why you can’t always get what you want)

Colin Mc Cullough, eMedia, 14 December 2001

The aim of this presentation?

- to show we expect too much from today’s web

- to show the web was designed for humans not machines

- to show why it should be designed for machines

- to point (tentatively) to how things MAY improve

FAR

Which brings up back to ……… ?

LAME DUCKS

AND

FLYING DOGS

Why such a silly example?

Because it shows the web is not contextual

Because it shows we have created in the web a cyber-bicycle for coast to coast or intercontinental travel

…and because

then we complain!

So let us look at

and

‘s

‘s

Any ideas what we find on a search engine?

Lame duck?

Lame duck?

An excellent Californian wine(only $8.50 a bottle) ……..

A small publishing house ………

A way of describing LOTS (and lots) of people …….

….and very little about our aquatic friend, the duck

We can repeat this exercise for our canine friend

And the results would be similar

‘s

The flying DOG

Basically, therefore,

…………. we have a communication problem

The stupid web doesn’t understand what I want

Why?

Simple answer!

The web finds words not concepts

It has nothing to do with the way I think…. and could care even less about it

And don’t complain…it was made to do just that

So, I’m right – we expect to much

But what about my claim?????

It’s designed for humans …not machines?

And even worse, and I am telling you

I think that’s bad!

My defense is simple mathematics

The WWW has about 2 billion visible pages

They increase by some 7.5 million per day(that’s 312,500 pages an hour)(only 5,200 pages a minute)(O.K….it’s only about 90 pages per second)

It’s the largest knowledge repository in the history of mankind

Don’t use nail scissors to cut the lawnThis is a job for the cyber lawnmower

If we are not to drown in a tidal wave of information

AND WE ARE ALREADY DROWNING

(It’s called surfing sickness)

I suggest we need help?

But what kind of help?

Option I

If the web is for people then get people to do it?

Possible solution but very impractical

When you’ve indexed today’s 7.5 million pages

Got back and do yesterday’s again – many of those 7.5 million have changed in the meantime

So the idea is ?

Where do we go from here?

Option number 2

We could describe the resources we are putting on the web so that computers can find them

We could even agree on a common vocabulary for doing this

Feasible and partially implemented

We get out what we put in!

Info on the web without structure, without description

=A public library- without shelves- without catalogue- and (more importantly) without a librarian

Nothing but a big heap of books Enter!

But we will be able to do more than that

We can INFER:

If A = B and B = C

We can INFER that A=C

This in the context of networked information retrieval?

Happy duck(not lame)

Both interesting

AND

Very frightening in my view

Why interesting???

It means:

Searching the web for the word “train” won’tgive me the time of the next TGV from Paristo Lyons

It will give me train, bilden, former, formare

The search will know what I am looking for (conceptually)

This idea can be put in one term

THE SEMANTIC WEB

(Happy duck =Happy web surfer)

Why frightening?

What else can we expect in the future from the web?

A few thoughts on how it can improve

1. It can become multi-directional2. It can mirror sources3. It can ensure more reliable access4. It can remove the hyper from the

text

Other issues it will address?

Copyright!Intellectual Property Rights!

In short the web can and will become more human

Less of a LAME DUCK

Where even dogs can fly

(P.S.

is a BAT

found in rain forests in Thailand)