....And other questions of the universe have been troubling me for some time. In my head there are questions that never get answered and ones that are almost always there to be slowly chipped away.
One of the key questions I ask myself is do we have good data to make decisions. Those who read the Professor on a regular basis know that I have this progression of data to power.
Data--> Information --> Knowledge --> Power.
One of the critical issues facing our society is the overload of data. How do we create ways for us to comprehend all the data available.
How much of it is useless?
How much of it can be inferred?
How much is qualitatively good?
As lately I have been looking at different ways to refine the process of getting at the relevant information this makes me think about search - I keep coming back to the data driven pure objective search all the way through to the highly subjective desirable results. Search remains a thoroughly unfulfilled experience today. Both in the B2B environment and of course the B2C web based environment. And I doubt highly that Google will make it - sufficiently - better when they acquire ITA as they surely will be able to.
I have no answer - I am thinking about search a lot. Fortunately the Shirt problem is not urgent. The search to the better result however is very urgent. And it is a critical matter.
Cheers
One of my favourite quotes: "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom." ---Clifford Stoll
ReplyDeleteBtw there is an exciting new field called data mining which deals with turning huge amounts of data into bits of information. I guess I should have mentioned it yesterday- could have made for a very interesting discussion.