A New Approach to the Dynamic Organization of Knowledge

Extract

The Internet poses a massive problem of making sense out of information. Two movements are taking place, side by side. On the one side, since the entry costs are very low, vast amounts of information of enormous variability in quality and value are being dumped on the virtual market. On the other side, to make some sense of it, “search entrepreneurs”—Excite, Yahoo, AltaVista—strive valiantly to create automated engines that will retrieve what we want when we want it. They succeed very imperfectly. One or two keywords are a very crude way to capture meaning of any complexity or nuance.