In my series of articles, I have been discussing ways to combat Infoglut, the curse of the Internet. The Internet has dumped vast amounts of unordered information at our feet. This leaves us, as I have said before, drowning in information and starving for knowledge. However, there are many new technologies out there that can help us to dispel this curse.

Highlighting the way to simplicity
This month, I want to discuss knowledge threads, the latest in our arsenal to combat Infoglut. Knowledge threads are common thoughts and ideas that span across documents and document collections.

Documents have a natural ability to automatically order knowledge into classes. These knowledge classes can then be highlighted in different colors, creating a color-coded map of knowledge types that thread their way through document collections, helping readers quickly and efficiently lift meaningful knowledge off the page. You can then harness this knowledge for immediate learning and business value.

Untamed data
Remember the last time you researched a document collection, or when you read, assimilated, delegated, and tracked the action items in a large volume of email? How about your last Internet search? Remember how overwhelming it became when the full text search returned 40,000 items? How could you possibly read all that text and piece together the knowledge you were looking for?

Color-coding knowledge threads throughout document collections let's you quickly assimilate and harness knowledge buried in unstructured text across large volumes of documents. The technology already exists to help you do it. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not personally aware of any other vendors who provide this type of functionality besides my company. However, this article should act as inspiration to other developers who might consider using this powerful organizational tool.

You may ask incredulously how such technology can work. The answer is, by doing automatically what you have for years done manually when you highlight text in a book or document. It works through dynamically adaptive associative intelligent technology that emulates the process of speed-reading, speed-learning, and mass-data assimilation.