The purpose of intelligent information processing in general seems to be creation of simplified images of the observable world at various levels of abstraction, in relation to a particular subset of received data.Teuvo Kohonen, Self-Organizing Maps
Were all maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each landmark become a meaningless signpost to nothing.Beryl Markham, West with the Night
When you are interacting with a computer, you are not conversing with another person. You are exploring another world.John Walker, ``Through The Looking Glass,''
in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (Brenda Laurel, Editor)
The world wide web is growing exponentially. Many queries to the commercial search engines sometimes return millions of hits. What the web needs to be is personalized. Each user should have a program that maintains that user's particular domain of interests so that every search is modified and focussed on webpages that are most likely to interest that particular user. To do so seems to require that the web be mapped. Unfortunately it is probably impossible to map the whole web in any meaningful way, and it certainly is impossible to do it unaided by computers. However, it is possible to map portions of the web in an incremental fashion by starting with a nucleus of sites that a particular user has demonstrated interest in and then automatically branching out from there. This proposal sketches a computer system to do that.