If parts of my web or digital spaces know little about me, their interfaces will help me make decisions. If they know more about me, they will make decisions for me.
A semantic giving architecture will move away from search lists where I do the work, to spaces where choices are organised around my interests, my behaviour and intentions, providing a starting point for journeys and experiences related to my world.
A giving architecture will do increasing amounts of my thinking and will involve semantic clustering, visual and assisted decision making. Journeys will emerge where the search result is no longer the end point. A guided journey in and out of search based on context and user intent will emerge. Capabilities for a site or service to display semantic memory coupled with an understanding of context will increasingly provide competitive advantage.
And now the search box is starting to disappear. Users' past behaviour, interests and intention will define the entry and exit journeys and how the experience will sit within wider objectives, whether selling a product or deliverying the needs of a social informivore.
The user experience is increasingly defined by context - intent, user profile / interest and past behaviour. All of this overlayed with a business or consumer process so that 'finding' becomes more of a dialogue than a monologue. As the trend shifts from search box to user behaviour and context, a next-generation search will leverage:
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semantic clustering
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continuous results
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next generation interfaces - visual search, RIAs, multi-touch
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contextual experiences
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experience within a business or consumer process
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user-generated content
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knowledge-sharing networks
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tagging
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highly interactive models (persoanlized ranking)
In short almost all next-generation consumer or enterprise applications will require some form of semantic giving architecture to ensure that the user receives releveant content specific to their needs at different times.
It requires a highly developed ability to determine what a user is actually trying to accomplish and HAS to be smarter and more contextual than google. User experience innovations will ensure that users don't have to work hard to get what they want or to reach their aspirations.
Related URLs:
cuil | similpedia | clusty | yahoo! glue