The Structure of Unstructured Information

In computer science, the historical approach was to find a way to shuffle and organize information into data structures that existing computers could manipulate. Databases, indexes, functions, objects and so on. The result of these techniques was that the underlying structure of the information was usually lost. Once the internet emerged at an international level, the problems of computer science based information management became transparent. Graduate students from many fields realized this problem and started search engines that help organize information on the internet in a fairly obvious way, still based on computer science techniques. Even so, companies that were started to search and organize information on the internet have been significant commercial successes, still with limited real effectiveness for their users. The internet presents information processing problems at a different scale and nature than the problems computer science had evolved to manage. It is a problem of structure. When computer scientists were confronted with the vastness and growth of the internet and its language based information, they primarily turned to statistical methods to divine structures for the information collections on the internet. Computer Science is unique as a science because it endeavors to place information, a natural phenomenon , INTO computer based structures. On the other hand, natural sciences works to DISCOVER the structure of a natural phenomenon, in this case the internet, and then investigate how that structure evolved. The structure of a natural phenomenon cannot be separated from its evolution and natural development. So man cannot create natural structures - for a literary reference see Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Natural science techniques can be applied to internet information, especially since the internet exhibits clearly natural, biological characteristics. The information on the internet is structured at all levels, the level of words, the level of sentences, the level of paragraphs, the level of pages, the level email, the level of web sites, the level of categories, and so on. These levels occur naturally, they emerge and self-organize, and form the natural structure of the information on the internet. Without this structure, people could not communicate to one another. Since this structure is complex and not obvious, the Computer Science community refers to the internet as unstructured data, when in fact it is naturally structured language. There is a significant opportunity to apply current findings of neuroscientists, psychologists, and applied mathematicians and their discoveries of the structure of language and its operation in humans and communities of humans. This new approach has detected small and large scale structures in language, and these discovered structures can be used to self-organizing language based intelligent cyberstructures that can be searched and interacted with human understandable languages. Whether this new web will be called the Semantic Web or the Natural Langauage Web is still an open discussion. Sincerely, Steve Kohler www.iwoorx.com