Towards Social Discovery – New Content Models; New Data; New Toolsets by Matthew Berk, Founder of Lucky Oyster.
From the post:
When I first came across the field of information retrieval in the 80′s and early 90′s (back when TREC began), vectors were all the rage, and the key units were terms, texts, and corpora. Through the 90′s and with the advent of hypertext and later the explosion of the Web, that metaphor shifted to pages, sites, and links, and approaches like HITS and Page Rank leveraged hyperlinking between documents and sites as key proxies for authority and relevance.
Today we’re at a crossroads, as the nature of the content we seek to leverage through search and discovery has shifted once again, with a specific gravity now defined by entities, structured metadata, and (social) connections. In particular, and based on my work with Common Crawl data specifically, content has shifted in three critical ways:
No, I won’t even summarize his three points. It’s short and quite well written.
Read his post and then consider: Where do topic maps fit into his “crossroads?”