Collective Intelligence

4. October 2008 | From Tino Kressner | Category: WebTrends

The collective intelligence, and swarm intelligence, is a philosophy by a collection of individuals acting together purposefully. Several people are smarter than every man for himself individually. According to this theory, many Web 2.0 applications set up. It is a platform available to users and to actively develop their knowledge and add information and media content is added.

After the Web 2.0 pioneer Tim O'Reilly, it is collective intelligence in the future also increased in passive form. As an example, he stated that if a picture is created, together with the image information, via a built-in camera, GPS, while information on the location. If the image to the online platform Flickr photo set, it can have this information with other images semantically linked. For example, Microsoft is working on the software "Photosynth" with the photos from digital 3D models to be created. It is a three-dimensional image of our world, without which a man himself composed these photos, but with semantic links, here also called "tags" called.

O'Reilly believes that the speech a "key technology" for the networked "world knowledge" is. Many information requests are still too cumbersome. Straight on is often waived emerging questions about the cell phone keypad to Google. Be first and answers queries about the language, people can share their knowledge at any time from any location sharing. The entire knowledge of mankind could be accessible at all times.

The utopian idea that even reality could be confirmed Lupo Pape, Geschäftsführer SemanticEdge, a company for natural language dialog systems: "The missing elements that were already available, so that there is only a matter of time had come to the human world to this new interface accustomed to. "

The history of Wikipedia

The people are ready to share their knowledge and network, is the example of world knowledge platform wikipedia show. More than 10,000 people worldwide regularly write here entries for the online encyclopedia. When in 2000 the bubble to the commercial Internet first burst, Jimmy Wales decided together with his employee Larry Sanger for a variant of a free online encyclopedia that each can be written with. The term "Wikipedia" is a fusion of the words "Encyclopedia" and "wiki", the Hawaiian word for "fast".

Originally wanted to Wales and Sanger with the project Nupedia an online encyclopedia, which with items from a small circle of authors should be fed. Each article was subjected to a detailed examination. This has developed slowly according to the project. End of 2000, then Wales and Sanger on WikiWiki software carefully, by the American software developer Ward Cunningham 1995, the first time was released. More than fun project who went on 10 Then in January 2001 within the project Nupedia a wiki online and was five days later under its own address wikipedia.com reach. This wiki should be the joint creation of articles that are then the normal inspection process should go through Nupedia. The further development proceeded, as the term "WikiWiki" says, very quickly.

Two months after the foundation had already been over 2,000 pages online, a year later, the celebrated and 20.000ste Article Nupedia slowly set. In parallel, created after their own language versions of the encyclopedia. Behind Wikipedia is not a fixed editorial, not a publisher, not a high budget, no advertising and no user fees. Only the power of the people their collective knowledge to make available up to now has eight million items, including 620,000 in German, to appear. Meanwhile, Wikipedia exists in 250 languages and is among the top 10 websites worldwide next Google, YouTube, MySpace and Yahoo!.

In Spiegel Special "We are the network" said Wales: "I do not know whether I was the smartest or the stupidest decision of my life had taken." The project lives only by donations and is organized as a foundation. The collective knowledge of humanity, current, archived and accessible for everyone and free. Critics argue the project the error vulnerability that arises because each can write. In contrast, the Encyclopædia Britannica several from a paid editorial staff checked for errors before they pressure is released. They also claimed that human knowledge in as much as possible for completeness ( "The Sum of Human Knowledge") and is supported by approximately 4,000 experts and scholars wrote. In the 32 printed volumes are 75,000 articles, which together accounted for 1,400 U.S. dollars can be acquired.

In 2005, the science magazine "Nature" a comparative test on the basis of 42 scientific articles by. 162 errors were found in Wikipedia, 123 in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Among the authors on-line has a separate control mechanism. When people from an idea and can be persuaded it to follow this example happen that they are simply fun and pleasure to have this shape and develop.

But the existing knowledge on the Internet is much more extensive than Wikipedia ever be alone. First, there is, as already mentioned, 250 languages of Wikipedia variants, which are equal and similar information on different topics in different languages, and secondly, there are millions of other sites on the knowledge in the form of text, video and audio is stored. All this to capture, evaluate and semantically linked to a task in the future and could, according to some researchers at the Web 3.0 Way to be. With the further improvement of translation software and language barriers could be overcome, as is already the fictional nature Babel Fish supremacy. With the increasing mobility of the Internet (UMTS, mobile flatrates) might the networked world of knowledge in the future, so at any time, from anywhere for any freely accessible.