Nature Web Matters

Communicative What does it mean to be able to communicate with someone (or something, in the computational case)? Greatly simplifying an issue which has been a cornerstone of intellectual thought for many years, useful communication requires shared knowledge. While this includes knowledge of a language the words and syntactic structures it is even more focused on knowledge about the problem being solved. To deal with a travel agent, you need to be able to talk about travelling, to interact with a florist you need some knowledge of flowers, and to deal with an internet agent you must share a vocabulary about the area of concern. A key problem with current search engines is that although based in language, they have no knowledge of the domains of interest. Searching physics papers would be enhanced if the search engine actually'knew' something about physics (how experiments are performed, which words are ambiguous, whether papers are theorerical or empirical, etc.), rather than simply looking for the appearance of key words.