Making Information Useful

The internet has opened up the world to a sea of information, creating both difficulties and opportunities for data hungry organizations.  While information may be accessible, separating the relevant from the irrelevant has become a problem that sparked the creation of a multi-billion dollar industry.  Pioneers, such as Google, still pave the way in developing innovative methods to find relevant information. Google has been extraordinarily helpful at turning my unintelligible statements into articulate searches.  Online memes have even been established based on how abstract your search can be, while still returning useful data.  In order to make sense of the jumbled mess of information online, innovation has presented impressive ways to collective, analyze and present information.

A library could be dedicated to the books studying the science of information visualization.  There are popular sites like Prezi, which change the dynamics in how we can connect information.  Further research finds the core technologies driving software innovations like Prezi.  Deep zoom technology is one such technology.  It has created a method to take images and view them at multiple zoom levels without compression or heavy data loads.  It’s better shown than described:

This technology has been mostly used by photographers and designers in the commercial world, but the business applications are vast and untapped.  The above link demonstrates how multiple information sources can be seen at once.  While I can't post them, I have several projects that have gone beyond the abilities of this Photosynth by linking relevant data sets based on multiple variables.  The technology is still in its infancy and offers possibilities that have only begun to be imagined.

There have also been innovations in the more broad pursuit of aggregating available data.  There are online services that automatically extract and link data sources, allowing a more comprehensive understanding of an issue.  Silobreaker has been a pioneer in offering this service for free.  However, there are many companies, such as the ones featured in my OSINT post, which can provide analysis beyond showing relationships.

Information online is viewed in layers. There is underlying content “beneath” the visible data that we see in our everyday online activities. Traditional search services lack the ability to mine through the all layers of information on the net, so a niche was born.  Sites, such as Pipl, have developed methods to dig up that hidden data and connect it with data on the visible web.  “Data mining”, as it’s called, has become so complex that I have a bookmark folder full of specialized search engines.  With the web barely in its adolescent years, I wonder what more a mature internet will require in order to navigate its information.