It's said that information
technology is special because - unlike previous technology innovation - it
extends our brain. The steam engine extended our muscles, the telephone our
hearing, television our eyes, airplanes gave us wings... while computers (also)
extend our memory, computing power, analysis capabilities, help to find connections
between things and so on.
Often when I want to gather
information about something, I look up on the internet, read some books and ask
colleagues. I assume that most of us do it in the same way. What I miss here is
some kind of extender. What if a tool would be attached to my word processor
which analyses what I'm writing and looks up relevant information on the
internet? It also could use the files on my computer, in the company
database or even tell me which friends
or colleagues have similar interests.
It doesn't even seem to be
very complicated. Modern search engines are fairly good at comparing documents and
finding similar ones. The tool could e.g. extract the keywords from my text and
use them for a more exact analysis. In the next step maybe I would allow
the tool to map my knowledge (i.e. build a thesaurus form the keywords I use)
and use this map to see the structure of my knowledge. This would allow to look
for documents, websites, databases... which fit part of my knowledge structure and
also to see the weak points or hot spots (problems which occupy me the most). With
the help of this information I could see where I have holes in my knowledge and
get help to solve hard problems.
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