Organic Portals – A natural approach to finding information.

Abstract

One of the major criticisms of the Internet has been that of information overload and a massive loss of relevance. The unstructured nature of the very Internet’s design has seen initial enthusiasm fade from buoyant expectation to pure frustration as people try to wade through and make sense of mountains of information. There had to be a better way to structure and present the information and services available to Internet users. Portals were said to be the solution.

One new and totally radical approach to finding, organising, and distributing valuable and relevant information is being hailed as a breakthrough. It is being termed by some as an "organic" Portal. Instead of using traditional computer science database models it turned to the insect world for answers. It also turned the entire approach to storing and retrieving information on its head by utilising the same methods ants use to find and retrieve their food stocks.

To begin with, it doesn't even start with information. It doesn't even start with the organisation of information. Instead both the information and its organisation become the emergent properties and knowledge of the system as it grows. This makes this approach uniquely different from all other Web-based information portals.

Just what exactly is a Portal?

Portal is really only a fancy name for a Web site or Internet service. A traditional Portal is expected to offer a far broader array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, news media, chat and on-line shopping malls to name just a few. Perhaps most importantly a Portal is expected to arrange and present information in a more meaningful and intuitive way.

A few years back these portal sites were sprouting up all over the Internet. The most successful have been those that have focused on a single industry or special interest group and tried to organise their information in a useful way for people who need to stay on top of that industry. A good portal should leave no need for further searching.

Why have Portals not been more successful then?

Portals have struggled in bringing organisation to the chaos of unstructured information on the Internet. The biggest challenge Portals face is in organising, indexing and presenting a huge and ever growing body of information. Their designers try to overlay the chaos of how and when information is created, wherever it is created, with some type of order. An often-impossible job at best!

Portals organise their information using many different methods; alphabetically by topic, in order of topic popularity, by geography, date sequence, by project phases, or many other entirely different agendas. Whatever method is used it is rarely intuitive and users are often left clicking aimlessly trying to navigate their way through a maze of links and pages.

Why is the "Organic" Portal different to traditional Portals?

Cancer Treatment World is a worlds first approach to Portal design in that it has taken a totally non-traditional and polar opposite approach to organising its information. The radical difference is that the underlying organisation is a revolutionary new approach to information exchange that has been appropriated from the insect world.

Unlike traditional models, it does not attempt to amass all the information that's been published on cancer treatment. Instead it creates nodes or virtual meeting rooms where visitors can discuss treatments. Each visitor can post articles, comments, or experiences with treatments in the meeting rooms they visit. Topics can range from early detection of a particular type of cancer to late-stage treatment.

How does the "Organic" Portal model work differently?

The inventor, Peter Small, explains, "The idea of an information system that starts with no information is not an easy proposition to accept. This is where it helps to understand how colonies of ants use a similar system to guide each other to sources of food. As ants search for food, they create a record of their pathways by laying scent (pheromone) trails." They don't use an electronic computer; they use the landscape, which acts as the hardware, to store the pathways or roadmaps to information.

Trails that lead to sources of food are continuously reinforced through the movement of ants as they go backwards and forwards from their nest as they collect the food. Trails that don't lead to sources of food are not reinforced and quickly evaporate. In this way, a record of trails is continuously being laid down and updated, dynamically mapping all known routes to current sources of available food.

If we use this same philosophy but instead of food sources, we substitute information as a source and "intelligent software" as a scent, we can see how a similar system would allow people to guide each other to the most valuable and pertinent information.

Cancer Treatment World emulates this system by providing a virtual landscape where people can lay trails to sources of information they have discovered. By arranging for these trails to end at clearly defined focal points (meeting rooms), followers of the trails can deposit pointers to the information they have discovered at places where other interested parties will find them. These end points can then grow into rich sources of information each focused on a particular narrow subject area and not diluted by irrelevant information.

This project also takes into consideration the natural reluctance of many people to get involved in community projects. It provides each visitor with an invisible set of "genes" in the form of software programs built into Web pages. These invisible programs, known as "Agents", allow the users to read and lay pathways without being consciously aware that they are interacting with the environment. Visitors don't have to interact personally in the meeting rooms. They can create personal Agents that can interact with others on their behalf.

Is this Portal suitable only for medical systems?

Although this particular project is aimed at providing information in the field of cancer treatment, the underlying system is generic and could be applied to many different situations. Environments where teamwork is valued and rewarded are the most obvious to benefit from this organic approach.

Business Intranets are one such system that could immediately benefit from this approach. In fact, almost any community based clubs or corporate knowledge bases could be immediately enhanced. Think about how much more intuitive would it be to diagnose and repair a computer problem if you could see a series of queries about the problem. Each answer would take you to more specific queries, eventually culminating in a node where information from others who have already traveled the same path resides?

What is this Software Agent?

A software agent is really no more than a software program that performs some type of information gathering or processing tasks out of site and in the background. Typically, an agent is given a very small and well-defined task to do.

While the theory behind agents has been around for quite a while it is only since the Internet has become prominent that their real potential has become evident. For instance, there is now software that enables you to configure an agent to automatically search the Internet for certain types of information.

In computer science, there is a school of thought that believes that the human mind essentially consists of millions of agents all working in parallel. These proponents believe to produce real artificial intelligence we need to build computer systems that also contain many agents and systems for arbitrating and negotiating among the agents' competing results.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au