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Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb has done a great piece on future web trends and he used my piece on Web 3.0 as part of the article. He choose to cover Expert Systems, one of my favorite areas of exploration. I wanted to elaborate on his post, but first lets take a look at it.

Read Write Web

8. Expert Systems; mentioned in Steven Spalding’s excellent post about “web 3.0″, an expert system is “a software agent that takes user input, runs it through a knowledge database and then generates an output using fancy technologies like neural nets”. Ten years from now, wrote Spalding, “Expert Systems won’t only be designed for general cases, but will be able to be easily generated to understand individuals tastes. [...] Imagine a world where your computer would generate a profile, a meme map about you based on your interactions with the web and refine your experience based on this map.” While this has things in common with the agents described in #4 and #5, it is more about having a vast knowledge db to refine your daily lifestyle.

Expert Systems

Human beings are intrinsically lazy creatures. That might not sit well with you, but intuitively you know its true. As a result, we seek to automate menial tasks. Expert systems pass on the strain of correlating common data sets to an agent that is much more efficient at doing so than you or I, a computer.

To aid in this discussion, here are a few definitions:

Expert System: An expert system, also known as a knowledge based system, is a computer program that contains some of the subject-specific knowledge, and contains the knowledge and analytical skills of one or more human experts.

Software Agent: In computer science, a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency. Such “action on behalf of” implies the authority to decide when (and if) action is appropriate. The idea is that agents are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves.

Practical Uses

All of this is fantastic if our only interest was obscure Computer Science theory, but you may be wondering where Expert Systems have found practical use. If you have ever had a sniffle and gone to WebMD for advice, then you have seen one in action. It takes information (such as your symptoms), runs it through a “black box” and spits out its opinion on what’s wrong with you. If you are really lucky, that opinion is at least roughly correlated with your real ailment.

The real power of Expert Systems, and how they may change the web will come when we can download a generalized “web agent” to our desktops. This agent, which would be a glorified Expert System, would collect data based on our surfing habits, shopping habits and whatever else we set it to monitor. This this data it could make suggestions and form a knowledge base it could use to simplify repetitive tasks. Imagine waking up in the morning to find a full list of articles that you find interesting summarized for you and available without you ever having to search. It could also store data that seems relevant to our common web tasks and allow us to easily reference it using natural language search.

An extension of this idea could be implemented into search engines. Google is doing something similar with their idea of “search history”. In this case, search engines would aggregate and generalize these user profiles and use them to personalize and enhance search.

It is a world defined not by the strength of a arbitrary search algorithm, but one of mass personalization where every search that you make and every result that you decide to follow up on means that your next search will be more and more accurate.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Thanks again to Richard for covering this piece. If you would like to see more about my “Future of the Web,” get your printers fired up and take a look at this. I warn you, it’s long.

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