The Interspace: Concept Navigation Across Distributed Communities

Within the next decade, computing technology will transform the Internet into the Interspace, an information infrastructure that supports semantic indexing and concept navigation across widely distributed community repositories. With the Interspace, the global information infrastructure will, for the first time, directly support interaction with abstraction. This infrastructure uses technologies that go beyond searching individual repositories to analyze and correlate knowledge across multiple sources and subjects. The Interspace will offer distributed services to transfer concepts across domains, just as Arpanet used distributed services to transfer files across machines and the Internet uses distributed services to transfer objects across repositories. The Community Architectures for Network Information Systems Laboratory has developed a working Interspace prototype that uses scalable technologies for concept extraction and navigation. They have successfully tested these technologies, which compute contextual frequency of document phrases within a community repository, on discipline-scale, real-world collections.