Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!OZ.AI.MIT.EDU!Wayne From: Wayne@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network Message-ID: Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 08:29:00 EST Article-I.D.: MIT-OZ.MDCG.WAYNE.12351586239.BABYL Posted: Wed Nov 18 08:29:00 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 04:38:57 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 84 [Drexler presented a stimulating talk at the MIT Media Lab yesterday on hypertext, which quickly developed into a discussion about how to filter out all the junk which would be attached by billions of people to trillions of documents, and to zoom in on precisely that small set information which is most valuable for one's purposes. Drexler is seeking to make an important distinction between micro-hypertext--for instance, programs like Hypercard whose domain is the information space of an individual user--and macro-hypertext, whose domain is the information space of the entire world. I agree with him that the latter technology is far more interesting than the former. (Let me emphasize that the terms "micro-hypertext" and "macro-hypertext" are my own invention, and may not be properly descriptive. Following is a message about his talk to another list, the context of which should be obvious. -- WHM] Drexler's hypertext talk seemed to serve mainly as an occasion to discuss the problem of filtering the deluge of often trivial information which the creation of a global hypermedia network will inevitably exacerbate by many orders of magnitude. A few thoughts: The filtering problem might best by solved by a regular communication between two agents: (1) one's intelligent personal assistant which runs continuously and automatically in the background on one's local machine, monitoring, analyzing, and weighting one's attentional patterns, interests, and cognitive styles and capacities, and (2) a global superintelligence which is stocked full of algorithms which combine the best insights and rules of thumb from the best minds in all fields for measuring the worth of and prioritizing new information in general and within specific domains. The personal assistant would build an ever-evolving and changing model of its master's mind, and periodically communicate it to the global intelligence; the global intelligence, in turn, would recommend from the set of all information in the world the best set of information (in its wise estimation) which would satisfy the needs, and and maximize the personal development, of the user, taking into account the present state of his or her knowledge, resources, etc. This scheme might really not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Even now it would be feasible to write a program running as a background meta-task which would monitor a user's computing activity and determine, say, that Walter or Mary is more interested in Qlisp than hypertext, and even more interested in multiprocessing micros than Qlisp. A simple analysis of word frequencies would suffice, but one can imagine even more sophisticated algorithms to fine tune the cognitive and attentional profile. Walter or Mary would probably not know all the language forms in which information about multiprocessing micros is expressed, or all the sources of information in the world on the topic ranked by value, but the global intelligence most certainly would. The basic elements of a global intelligence for information evaluation are already in place. Consider, for instance, the mammoth citation indexes produced by the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. ISI has developed formulas for measuring the citation frequencies and citation impacts of authors, works, serials and organizations. The presumption is that an object with a high citation impact might be more worthwhile to pay attention to than one with a low citation impact. Another approach in citation analysis has been to uncover automatically networks and families of authors, works, serials and organizations through co-citation analysis. Objects which are often co-cited with other objects are usually closely connected conceptually. Citation analysis is only one of many methods that could be integrated into a global information evaluator that would make gentle recommendations to a personal assistant offering it a user profile. Of course, the privacy issue will be raised by many. The simple solution is to turn off your personal assistant, or leave it on but don't let it talk to the global brain. The bottom line in all of this is that by maximizing the personal development of each individual, the full potential of society as a whole can be fulfilled to the benefit of everyone. Marvin at Drexler's talk referred to an information retrieval system (Indexor?), developed by David Waltz's group at Thinking Machines, which locates other documents out in information space which closely resemble by certain complex criteria a given document at hand. Does this program only run on Connection Machines? Will a smaller version of it be developed for personal computers? Wayne