When we started MyST Technology Partners, we frequently made the comment that important information should find us instead of us always searching for it. The first overt instance of that capability came when we implemented SmartPoints - additional search results that indicate who is likely to know the most about a search topic and what channels are likely to hold more information about a search topic. This is pretty compelling when you first start playing with it (the free public site provides this capability).

"in the last two decades there has been increasing attention on a new set of problems those dealing with the interactions between multiple computational entities" -- Steven C. Laufmann

This is an important indication of a shift that is driven in part by the increasing volume of information that we have to deal with as well as the drive to create content that is machine readable. At no time in computing history have companies agreed on semantic tagging standards until now. Large software firms that are at each others throats have concluded that supporting XML open standards are key to the future of successful computing strategies. This has now paved the way for significant advancement in terms of agent technologies.

Of greater interest is the idea that agents can work on your behalf to retrieve information in advance of you needing it. This sounds AI'ish, but it really isn't that difficult or far-fetched. With Web services architectures it's now possible to gather additional information relevant to some activity immediately after the activity has begun. An example of this can be found at blueskycolorado.com. As content writers create articles about outdoor activity, queries into Amazon.com are dynamically updated to include the keywords of the articles. We use the Amazon API to make real-time requests for visitors - so, as new material is added, the system naturally maps the interests of the writers to books that are relavant - all in real-time.

I'm not an expert on agent technologies, but I know one when I experience one. ;-) I experienced the benefit of an agent just this morning when I reviewed my RSS feeds from six channels that are being updated every 12 hours by a "channel gear". A channel gear is an agent designed to keep a collection of content about a specific subject up to date based on what Google is aware of. This (among the many machineries) is largely unknown about the MyST platform - we have an agent scripting mechanism that doesn't require any expertise about the Google API or the MyST API. As a business content expert, I'm able to script instructions that carry out the steps of finding information and updating target channels. But to really make this approach dance, the agents that harvest important content for me are supported by another type of agent - an RSS reader. A good example of this can be found on the RSS WinterFest Site. The content items in the RSS Radar section are all automated queries against Google, but they also include RSS feed addresses.

My hope is that as we continue to build new information systems that seem instinctively aware of activities surrounding you, the system will naturally invoke behaviors that essentially say "And BTW, I retrieved this information because you'll be needing it."

If you have an interesting application where this might be useful, give us a shout.

For the corporate information worker, the nature of learning is fundamentally driven by connecting people that have questions to people that have answers. This is likely the most important learning process in any organization. One way to accelerate this is to provide mechanisms that expose subject matter experts in applications where office workers spend a great deal of time.

"Expert locators connect you to the person with the right answer." -- Jay Cross

The Microsoft Office Research Task pane coupled with MySmartChannels Office Research Services (ORS) provides a simple and effective means for displaying SmartPoints(tm) that call out domain experts whenever a search is performed. This service integration provides "expert locator" capabilities that factor in the social relationship between information items and the people that write them.

Today we started testing the new MySmartChannels Office 2003 Research Service (ORS), a web service integration with Microsoft Office 2003.

MySmartChannels Office Research Services (ORS) lets Microsoft Office 2003 users securely search across any number of MySmartChannels servers from any Office 2003 application, including Outlook, OneNote and Visio. Search capabilities leverage the full capabilities of the MySmartChannels platform.

Feature Highlights

• Find channels, channel items, spaces, and users
• Find semantically related items using SmartPoints(tm)
• Login for secure access based on your credentials
• Single sign-on from any Office application
• Search public content without logging in
• Monitor any search result using your RSS news reader

The Office Research task pane (new in Office 2003) makes it delightfully simple to search both public and secure content sources.  Additionally, users can subscribe to any search result as an RSS feed.  By subscribing to a research RSS feed in a news reader such as NewsGator, users are automatically notified as new search results become available.

If you have Office 2003 installed and would like to be an early beta users, drop us a note. We also provide MyST as an Office Research Service development system.

We don't think enough about the possibilities of a wired society. Take for example the lift line at a ski resort. Typically, a chalk board (now whiteboards seem to be in vogue) is used to notify friends and relatives of an injured member of their group to contact a Ski Patrol worker. That reminds me - I need another glucosamine dose.

I wonder how long it will be before someone creates an emergency notification system that leverages the power of a simple RSS feed. My cell phone can read RSS content - it's only a matter of connecting a few dots to get it to ding or vibrate given some extended RSS content.