How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item?
If the answer is “too often,” a company in San Francisco, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents.
Twine, at twine.com, can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize.
Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer
from their context.
Customers have individual accounts on Twine’s Web site, where they save URLs or other information.
They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines public.
For instance, people planning a trip to Italy could send all the Google maps, articles and travel guide Web pages they are collecting to Twine.
As each document is added, Twine automatically tags items and adds them to the database for the Italy trip, compiling an index with references to, for example, Pisa, Rome and Siena; Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon and Dante; and the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg
family and St. Peter’s.
The more documents that are added, the more numerous the references and the more links to related information.
Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web — foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely answer…