Knowledge Navigator

[andrewducker]

sbisson had a link to a 1988 Apple video showing where they thought knowledge management and computer interfaces were going.

Amusingly, we could now do the vast majority of this, if the will was there to do so. It'd be expensive, and not quite so smooth, but the main barriers are getting people to store information in such a way that the necessary details are easily extracted from it.

Take a look, it's an eye-opener.

Comments

[broin.livejournal.com]

Good little vid.

Mind you, if there was a way to ensure people kept information in ways that'd be easy to access, wouldn't we be doing that already? Me, I think we need a way to extract keywords and context, coz people are useless at it.

"we could now do the vast majority of this"

[josephgrossberg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, except the whole "talking to your computer in a rambling conversation and having it understand what you're talking about" part.

I don't think it's a matter of extracting the details so much as the computer knowing what it's looking for.

I mean it's 2003 and we still have to use boolean logic in a simple web search. And even then, spears -britney finds last names instead of weapons.

Re: "we could now do the vast majority of this"

[andrewducker]

Contextual meta-data is the next big thing (well, hopefully) and this should help a lot.

One can only assume that his device knows the context of whatever he's used to working on, and his usual sources of information. Also that it's searching through more organised sources of information that contain abstracts and the various categories they fit into.