Watson had not been on my mind when I wrote my last blog post. In fact, if you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, "Watson!", my immediate response would have been "Elementary, Holmes!" Despite being vaguely aware of a project called Watson underway in my company, the name didn't really mean "Wow" to me till, well, last night. But before I tell you why, let me go back a bit - and talk about my last blog post. In that post, I had implied 'storage' and 'retrieval' are two different things and, while tagging and indexing might work when one is storing something, the same tag or index could fail while retrieving the data. In my post, I had put foward a question - should content be context insensitive for it to be reused effectively? Conventional wisdom - that which runs search engines and SEO jobs - says, "No".
And then came along Watson, and beat two people in Jeopardy to win an indecent amount of money, which, it was declared, would be given to charity. A computer beat two awesome humans.
Somewhere halfway through this video, when analysing why Watson got 'Chicago' wrong, you'll see the IBM engineer say something like "the info was stored in sectors but this was not about discrete compartments" or something to that effect.
Exactly! Human brain does not process information in linear paths. It hops, skips, jumps, runs around in circles. And, because we're getting there - with Watson's help - I think in my lifetime at least I'll see content being reused in ways that I (the writer) never imagined it could be because the user (with help from Watson) is retrieving just that much - and only that much - information that the user needs. Correctly, every time, the first time. Smart user!
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