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i360Adds Semantics to Everything
Written bySarah Perez / May 5, 2008 12:55 PM /8 Comments
Tony Sukiennik believes the power of the people trumps the power of the algorithm when it comes to the development of semantic technology. His company,infoGenome, a startup that has been in stealth mode for about four and half years, wants to harness that power by making semantics easy via its innovative drag-and-drop functionality. The i360software he's developed is essentially the "Mahalo of semantic apps," relying on human knowledge to add meaningful layers of metadata to the information we work with every day. With i360, you can add semantics to everything.
People-Powered Semantics
When you're doing a web search, you instantly know what information is relevant and which isn't. At i360, they call this flash of understanding an "instant of information insight." In a split second you can identify something as being useful, but the problem in today's world is that there are too many ways to store that information - you can tag it, bookmark it, save it to file, email it, blog about it, share it with others, and so on. Overwhelmed by choices, busy people often choose to "just remember it," a decision that leads to the inevitable: forgetting. The human mind is already overloaded with input, so isn't the ideal repository for storing all the complexities of our information-filled lives.
Instead, software should be doing the remembering for us. That's where i360comes in. The application itself, self-funded but seeded byBill Campbell, Google advisor and chairman of Intuit, is really just a prototype of this conceptual idea, but one that Tony hopes Google might be interested in. Or maybe Microsoft. (He plans on proposing his ideas to both companies to see who bites.)
What the i360software does is provide a way quickly add mark up and add meaning to the data you're working with - be it a link on the web, an email, a file, or anything - with semantics. This process is done via a quick drag-and-drop into the app.
That isn't to say that this technology is using semantics in the technical sense of the word - it's not about converting everything into machine-readable formats for use on the semantic web; what it is doing, though, is adding semantics to everything by assigning meaning to that email, that PDF, that link, that note, that spreadsheet, etc. Meaning that only you, and not a computer or an algorithm, could know. In doing so, the technology is not focused on a semantic web per se, but a semantic database of your own, made up of not only web links, but also files, contacts, emails, keywords, and more, and knowing how they all are associated with each other.
Although Tony believes that we shouldn't give up on the algorithm - by all means, research should continue in that area - he feels strongly that his technology, which taps into the power of the human brain, gives people the ability to organize and assign value to information in a way that a machine cannot.
How It Works
What i360does is complex and sort of hard to understand if you're not working with it directly. In fact, it's easier to understand if you work backwards from the end result of using the technology.
For example, imagine you do a Google Desktop Search or a Google Enterprise Search, and, instead of just links to items that match keywords, you get something a little more like this:
Augmented Search Results
You can see that by using the software, you've managed to associate people, documents, notes, and more with the original file.
The process of making these associations is via a "fire and move on" drag-and-drop methodology. See a useful link? Drag-and-drop it into i360. Highlight some text and drag and drop that as the item's description. Click a button and a screenshot is added automatically. Now associate that link with a person. That  person with a Word document. That document with a search and an email...and so forth, and so on.
Saving a Web Page
Within a company, the i360technology can also be used to work with internally running applications, like Microsoft's SharePoint, for example...or any other application to which you have the cooperation of the vendor or access to the app's code base. With 100 lines of code, information from these applications can pass data from the app itself back to the i360environment as just another informational nugget that can be associated with a person, a file, or anything else.
There's more this application can do, too. For example, searches themselves could begin in a more structured format - focusing on just what you're interested in finding (see example below). Each item you're researching can be available with one click from a sidebar - no saving todel.icio.us required.
Focused Searching
The results of your searches can then be transformed into a new file with links (see below), retaining the same structure of your own headings and listed items, and that file can then be emailed to someone else or published as a page available publicly on the web. If you find something new to add to it, be it another link or a file or anything else, you can just drag-and-drop that new item to i360to update the results on the fly.
Formatted Results Can Be Shared With Others
A project team in the workplace could use the application together, associating people and emails and files and searches with each other, creating a database of content surrounding their project. A year later, an employee in another department could search via their company's enterprise search and find all the information in that project and how it all interrelates, even if all the original team members had moved on to other jobs in other companies. No more would "everything is stored in that one guy's head" be the norm. Employees could move on, but the data they created or found, and the way that data relates to other data, would remain.
Where It Needs Improvement
As a concept - simple drag-and-drop semantics - the technology is fascinating. In practice though, it's still very rough. You couldn't install i360and be off and running in minutes - you would still need training to know how to use it as it exists in its present form. It today's world of bubbly web apps, anything that isn't immediately intuitive isn't going to be adopted by the majority of users. The whole Enterprise 2.0 trend is about bringing the simplicity of consumer applications into the corporate world, and, although that is this software's goal, unfortunately, I can't say that it achieves it.
The UI itself is confusing. They've made some interesting choices - the address bar is at the bottom, for example; buttons are labeled with things like "E+" - a reference to the name of a portion of the software suite, but one that is meaningless to the new user. The graphics and fonts used look ancient.
The UI
Conclusion
However, that being said, if you can look past the UI to the underlying idea, there's something about this concept - human-powered semantics - semantics over everything - that could be great, if someone could just make it pretty. It could even be the future.

Posted in :Features,Products
Tags:data mining,semantic,semantic app,semantic search,semantic web
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Repeat after me.. "TAGGING does not imply SEMANTICS"
Capturing semantics in any form of computationally useful manner involves construction of hierarchical thingies and/or sharing them with others so that other people/applications/dogs/cats understand it in the same way you intended it to be.
Posted by: COP |May 5, 2008 2:52 PM

@COP: "construction of hierarchical thingies" is precisely what this software does, so, according to your definition, the term "semantics" applies here.
Posted by: Sarah Perez |May 5, 2008 3:44 PM

@Sarah
I guess.. Sorry but the article is just to complicated to understand, let alone whatever i360does. i mean what is with all those arrows over unreadable text -- too much. Rejected. Next?
Posted by: COP |May 5, 2008 4:40 PM

They call those "augmentations" in Google Desktop useful? Geesh people. This type of application belongs integrated with the OS layer. The only way you can add some sort of taxonomy to something, be it a web-page, contact, event, file, etc. and have it indexed and readily available with a decent user experience is to integrate this with the OS. This isn't an easy task, Microsoft and others have been working on a database driven file system for a while. Plugging components into web browsers and email software just ain't gonna cut it folks.
Posted by: rktect |May 5, 2008 5:28 PM

I am impressed. Sarah, thanks for pointing these guys out.
Self-service, people-generated relational "semantics" is exactly where I am hoping the future lies. So some code warrior (or lots of them) don't like it if they can't make a script that can guess what we want or need. Well, oh well.
As an aside, I'd like to point out much of the talk about "semantics" applied to the web is nothing more than semantics, itself. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semantics )
Personally, I see no other way to discover real relationships of any kind of the web without that human input. I think there has been too much emphasis on implicit data over the past few years. What's wrong with just asking people anymore?
My hat is off to these guys. It fell off when I jumped on their bandwagon.
Posted by:Jon |May 5, 2008 7:06 PM

Semantics over everything... interesting.. :-o
Posted by:MyMesh |May 5, 2008 7:46 PM

This is the author of i360posting...
I couldn't agree more with rktect about this being part of the OS. That's why were not trying to get this out to the general public (or Enterprise) because we think Microsoft or Google should do it. We'll help either one (or both) do it. The way I see it, if Microsoft innovates, Windows lives longer and eventually fully transitions to Cloud Computing. If they don't, Google becomes the OS. i360just consolidates and helps the transition from all of the disjoint Silos we all have to deal with today.
Jon, you are speaking our language. Until they put probes in our heads, the information relationships just can't be programatically extracted. This creates great exposure in the Enterprise because the real knowledge is locked in fragile human memory. i360just allows you to persist what we sense as being important and why it is important in our natural workflow.
Indeed, the concept is very difficult to cover in a post like this, or even the volumes we've written about it over the years of development. So watch theVideos and contact us if you'd like to discuss further or even kick the tires.
Posted by:Tony Sukiennik |May 5, 2008 8:04 PM

The idea is awesome. The only thing that leaves me some doubts is the realibility of this application. I have to try it.
Posted by: jc |May 5, 2008 9:53 PM

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