Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Flocking as method to organize online content
"It's always exciting at IFTF when several of the trends we're following intersect in a delightful moment of innovation. Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist Xiaohui Cui's system to gather and organize online information is grounded in the themes we've labled emergence, personalized media, sensory awareness, and math world. It applies the flocking behavior of birds to categorize feeds of online content into, well, "news you can use." From New Scientist:
Each "bird" carries a document, which is automatically assigned a string of numbers depending on the words it contains. Documents with a lot of similar words have number strings of the same length and a virtual bird will naturally fly with others carrying documents with number strings of the same length.
When a new article appears, software scans it for words similar to those in existing articles and then files the document into an existing flock, or creates a new one. The team has used the system to categorise online news stories from CNN and the BBC. The next step will be to allow people to click on a bird to display its document.