Wave Issue 0512 3/25/05 Article 10-01

***It's Time for Computers to Allow You to Find Information ''The
Way You Think,'' Says Siderean Founder; The End of the Digital
Jurassic Era, and the Rise of Human Insight

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.
March 21, 2005

Bradley P. Allen, founder of Siderean Software, Inc., told
industry executives that the "Jurassic Era" in information
management technology is nearly over, and that its next evolution
will favor agility and human insight as key adjuncts to the
technology. Allen made these remarks during a general unveiling
of his company to the information technology industry at the PC
Forum, taking place this week in Scottsdale, AZ.

According to Allen, the vastness of available information has
resulted in the evolution of two extremes in information
management that both depend upon the raw processing power of
today's computers. On the one hand, he said, are massive and
expensive enterprise knowledge management systems that provide a
hard-wired and nearly invariant context for the data. "You could
find, for example, all purchased metal parts that failed in the
field," he explained afterwards, "but unless the software
architects thought of it, you'd hit a wall trying to relate that
to world steel prices, which could drive quality down."

At the other end of the spectrum are the statistical search
engines, like Google, whose staggering views of worldwide data
can produce equally staggering lists of uncorrelated results.
"How do you explore the subtleties of an issue in the midst of a
thousand 'hits'?" he asked. "We're in a sort of 'digital Jurassic
Era,' where the growth of computing power has favored the
evolution of brawn, where mass prevails over insight," he stated.
"The result is that only a small fraction of the relevant
information buried inside the worldwide glut of data makes it
into the hands of those who seek it."

The solution, Allen said, is to re-task computers to leverage the
way we "think" about data, and to let us help in its management.
"Humans are brilliant at zeroing in on 'the right answer' when
presented with information that is organized into natural and
familiar groupings (or categories). We instantly discard the 90%
that is unimportant, drill down into the remaining 10%, discard
90% of that, and within two or three iterations we arrive at what
we need, if it exists. We can then crawl around Esther's
'neighborhood,' and learn a great deal in a very short time.
Seeing information organized into familiar contexts is the key,"
he said.

Allen's company, Siderean, has implemented just this capability
with a new approach to information management that dynamically
organizes the available data to exploit such human insight.
According to Allen, the computer is programmed to take its vast
processing power and long reach into data to present us with
natural and intuition-aiding choices, but we interactively make
the critical decisions -- in context.

Turn-key Faceted Navigation

There has been, of late, enough thinking about exploiting human
insight in navigating digital data that people have begun calling
such approaches "directed navigation" or "faceted navigation,"
with the occasional application beginning to appear. "Facets"
refer to the dimensions or multiple classes in the presentation
of available data (such as "color," "size," and "price range" or
"sex," "age range," "location," and "viewing preference").

"The challenge," said Dyson, "is to make it simple for the
content provider to arrange things in a way that not only makes
it easy for users to find the precise information they are
seeking, but that also lets them follow 'typed' links to other
relevant data wherever it resides inside the system -- for
example, to go from a parts listing, to the maintenance history
for one part, to the contact information for the maintenance
shop. That's so natural for a human -- and normally so tough for
a machine! Siderean isn't yet another search engine; I'd call it
a structure-discovery and presentation tool."

What sets Siderean's technology apart, Allen explained, is the
ease by which such capability can be integrated quickly into Web
sites, portals, or information management systems by IT personnel
or even "ordinary mortals." It also, out of the box, supports the
growing trends of "social bookmarking" -- the process whereby
users post online their own bookmarks to sites or data that
interests them and others can browse these posts, or even harvest
them for republication, and "user tagging" -- which allows online
users to "tag" information belonging to others with descriptors
(i.e., classifications) that can be used by anyone at some future
time to easily unearth that same information.

Although Allen admits such trends are just beginning to gather
momentum, they are just one of many possible benefits for
Siderean users and potential users. "Our technology goes in
typically in a matter of hours -- at worst several days -- and
begins offering users the benefits of faceted navigation
immediately thereafter. It's a significant step in the evolution
of information management and a clear departure from the
dinosaur-scale applications that we depend upon today."

Or, as Allen likes to think, perhaps it's the meteor. ...

www.siderean.com