Page III: The vast corpus of human knowledge could soon be published on the Internet. The problem now is how to wade through it.
In Flamenco, a Yahoo-like interface categorises artworks drawn from museum collections around the world by content (animals, heaven and earth, shapes and colours, and so on), century, artist, medium (such as painting, furniture, sculpture) and other identifiers. By going up and down the tree, users can browse through all the animal pictures found in the database, or they can zero in on, say, the years 1700 to 1709 and discover that the period, at least as represented by the database, produced only four paintings of hoofed mammals.
The search engine does not search on the visual information contained in the picture, said Kevil Li, a student on the project. Instead, searches are conducted on descriptive text submitted by the museums that digitise their artwork for such databases.
Other tools, such as Inxight and GeoFusion, produce graphical representations of data obtained through searches. GeoFusion, which makes software that can extrapolate from geographic data, was able to render a map of the movements of a tagged tuna.
By contrast, Inxight's software creates a map of relationships between names and topics. A search on the White House and business showed that Haliburton is the corporation linked most often to the White House. In a similar fashion, IBM's own WebFountain project is used to test how cohesive certain blogging communities are by how quickly and in unison they react to news events.
File systems will likely begin to disappear as search gains popularity. One of the phenomena that Microsoft researchers are finding in MyLifeBits is that files are largely ad hoc categories that become outdated, said Jim Gemmell at Microsoft Research.
Instead, data should be tagged so that if people remember a name or part of a name, they can find their way back to documents or pictures involving that person, or they can find documents created on the same day that they had a phone conversation with the person, even if the discussion involved something unrelated.
"The problem is not that we keep too much with MyLifeBits. The problem is how to use it," Gemmell said.
Poorer nations will also be able to take advantage of these advances, even without an electrical grid. The Internet Archive has created mobile bookmobiles in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard and others. The bookmobiles contain a printer hooked up to a satellite feed, which can print books for kids. Two are in operation in India, while another in rural Uganda prints about 1,500 books a week. The entire bookmobile, including the cost of the used van, is US$15,000, and 100-page books cost about a $1 to print and bind in the van.
"It takes about 12 to 15 minutes to make a book," he said. "It is cheaper for a library in the United States to print and give away a book than retrieve it."
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