Spivack demonstrated how a system like this can work in practice when his company Radar Networks launched the Web service Twine in 2008. A handful of AI relieves the user of the arduous tasks of tagging and organizing information. After Twine began attracting more than three million visitors a month, Evri, run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, bought the thriving service in March this year.

And before the month was out, Spivack began to explore the next untrodden territory on the Internet: the time dimension. Ever since short status updates à la Twitter and Facebook and location-based services such as Foursquare took the Web by storm, established providers from Google to Microsoft have been investing in real-time searches that list events pretty much as they happen. As Spivack explains: “The great thing about this method is that you can see what people are thinking here and now – whether it’s about an event, a product, a brand.”

“The next step will be for market researchers and companies to make forecasts based on this information. What stocks and shares are people talking about? And how will this affect their value? Or how effective is an advertising campaign? If we combine this type of instant analysis with a semantic search, we can take a very precise look at attitudes and trends in a particular target group – and it also works within a company,” explains Spivack. “Decision makers can think and respond much faster, which helps improve internal processes and answer important questions about sales, technology, support and customer satisfaction.”

The semantic value-added for Spivack is the ability to search intelligently across the time dimension – just as he plans with Live Matrix. Instead of simply trawling through millions of old and cached data, temporal data mining enables you to search forward, backward or sideways in the time dimension. “Our service is definitely aimed at consumers who don’t want to miss out on information or entertainment,” explains Spivack. “But it clearly has benefits for businesses too: organizations can browse through time and space in all databases and Web services, call up information and events and display them in temporal relation to each other.”

A bank, for instance, would see its internal documents, quarterly results, correspondence, analyst reports and all relevant data in an intelligent chronological pattern. “This allows executives to view their company in a completely new light,” says Spivack, suddenly snapping his laptop shut. He has another interview to get to. He certainly doesn’t need software to remind him that the technology community is hungry for his ideas.

Part one of article