In 1989 the internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. He created it as a place for data, information and knowledge exchange.

The main method was hypertext. This is not text that stands on itself but links to many other texts containing its context. All links together define a web of information. The connections lifts the separate text to form a more holistic whole: A web of knowledge that transcends the information.

Semantic Web

But an internet that only consists of text is only easily readable by people. People have to follow the links and scavenge the text for information. For computers it is not as easy. For this mr Berners-Lee came with a vision of a Semantic Web.

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

He described it as a system in which all words are provided with meaning: semantics. So computers can easily read what the letters/words are and find out what it all means. This so computers can scavenge text easier to find new meanings, to find new connections, to find new links.

Locked in paths

But where is it? A nice dream which is still not here… Why not? It is too difficult to create. Why write a text and provide all kinds of words with subtext? Why create separate layers of text for people and computers? Why lock it in into the same limitations as human text: linearity…

Linearity makes a text a one dimensional string. By scanning the string you can with Berner-Lees invention of hypertext choose a new path defined by the creator of the previous string. We are still locked into the document, the path delved out by the writer… It is an evolutionary step but not the endgoal for a true knowledge web.

Semantic Web evolved

To really set free a semantic web it should be free of the limitations of words. Maybe a node inside such web can link to a word, and the connections between nodes can be translated with grammar rules to text, so the knowledge can be formed on the spot in the form which is needed.

Our brain works the same. We don’t save knowledge in our heads in strings of words. We don’t walk the whole textual story of acquiring the knowledge to get to the element we seek. We create and follow direct connections to it. And by following the connections from that connection we create context, story. A story that is right for the moment.

The internet should be the same: free of text but full of links to create a real boom of knowledge. Then we can finally connect everything we know and create the rebirth of our collective intelligence.

Related

• End of Text: Locked in knowledge
• End of Text: knowledge = connections!

Image by Robert Hodgin, visit his webpage flight 404 for more supergreat work!

And we keep saving all our knowledge in text… But are we? In our brains there is no text. We save everything into neurons. No not even inside those neurons but in the connections between those neurons. We make associations based on logic. Cat is an animal, just like a dog. Our input travels through the paths of our brain to produce the right output. Highways are formed by making a connection stronger.

A lot is lost

We translate the knowledge to linear text to transfer it. We customize the linearity of the formed story when we speak to a person. We can adapt to his/her context. But when we save the knowledge inside text for general consumption a lot is lost. To consume the text we need to translate it back to ourselves. To our own knowledge and connections.

Connections!

But what if we save all our knowledge into connections, into webs, into networks? Into connections with faceless neurons without words, without language, without any symbol? We could always connect those connections with words and their synonyms. So those words are the knowledge blocks, the references. References to real world meaning. References to other references.

Surfing references

What if we could surf those references connecting them by logic. By logic that saves what the relation of those two words are. But we already do that by connecting words by grammar. Grammar = logic. Grammar linking the words makes the context.

Scavanging knowledge

By interpreting existing words, to seek their references, by using grammar to find their relation you can build connections and surf them. A question is just asking for a connection one has and the other does not. We already have the basics! Wikipedia is the first collection of knowledge. Tags like in del.icio.us are our methods of connecting knowledge. But both still locked in text.

Entering the Brain age

What if we drop text for saving knowledge? We are just locking the information in now. We need open standards! Standards that are free of a proprietary language. Like english has the current monopoly… We need to build an open network, an open connection, an open brain. The beginnings are already here! Who wants to join?

Related

• End of Text: Locked in knowledge

Circular Reasoning t-shirt by Jeff Sheldon, I own one

We save all our knowledge in text. We already have millions of books and trillions of webpages full of letters. We are a text based society. And transfer everything we know by language in the form of voice or text.

The strict path of a story

Knowledge appears in books, wiki’s, blogs, mails and in many other outings in the form of linear stories. Such a story takes you from a to z through a path chosen by the author.

The story is written for a certain generic reader with building blocks which such reader should understand. If you don’t have the right advance knowledge such a story will be difficult to read. In this way the knowledge is produced for a certain target group and is thus generalized. More is explained than needed to make the contents easy to grasp for as many people as possible.

The scavenger

As a good reader we learn to skip through texts and only read the essential parts to grow our knowledge. We only pick up the building blocks we need. In these times of information overloads it is necessary to filter. Any text containing information and not a linear experience can be scavenged for the blocks for new knowledge.

Problems with linear forms

In bringing all our knowledge in linear locked in forms it is not easy to search this information. It is not easy for computers to interpret and process the knowledge inside the text. We can now only filter on the combinations of words. But what if a synonym is used for a word you are searching…

Another problem is with language. We learn to interpret text in our early ages, we learn to understand it’s grammar and logical rules and we learn it in our mother language. There are differences in how text is written all over the world but there are also many commonalities in those texts. But it is so difficult to compare them. It is strange to see the English wikipedia full of knowledge and the Dutch wikipedia is only a fraction of that. These things made English my main information scavenge language… But what if we could combine all those locked knowledge…

Context matters

Text is always written from a certain context of the writer and towards a context of a reader. But what if the knowledge could adapt to the reader. What if the knowledge transfered was not locked into a linear form but in the dynamic way it is saved in our heads. What if the knowledge could adapt to our own context when received. It would save us so much time if we don’t have to filter knowledge out of text.

Related

• End of Text: knowledge = connections!

Image by Gìpics, creative commons image