VIA Interaction

Friday, January 20, 2006

Automated Information Architecture

I can remember talking about the Information Age back in college, when they had to train us how to use search engines for databases like Elias and the computer time was charged out to us by the minute.

At VIA, we try help customers navigate Web sites by mapping out relationships among Web pages using a painstaking process that begins with understanding the user, identifying the tasks and goals they have on a particular site, and methodically creating navigation elements that put the right content and links in front of a customer at the right time.

I've been interested in the way machines try to do this, and generally disappointed in the results.

But as the Information Age becomes a reality, there is money in making these relationships. And really smart people are trying to figure out how to do it most efficiently. Here's an interesting Business Week article about it, Math Will Rock Your World:

Neal Goldman is a math entrepreneur. He works on Wall Street, where numbers rule. But he's focusing his analytic tools on a different realm altogether: the world of words.

Goldman's startup, Inform Technologies LLC, is a robotic librarian. Every day it combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts in English. It reads them and groups them with related pieces. Inform doesn't do this work alphabetically or by keywords. It uses algorithms to analyze each article by its language and context. It then sends customized news feeds to its users, who also exist in Inform's system as -- you guessed it -- math.

How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.

By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves. ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/20/2006 09:08:00 AM

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