Suranga Chandratillake gave a talk under the Next Generation Search Systems Seminar Series today. He talked about Latent Web — the web created due to implied links rather than the explicit links created by users. He argued that there are many ways to detect such implicit links and sites like Flickr are doing that thru tags and other social mechanisms. Clearly there are many ways to detect these links — most of them are definitely difficult ones. But the web that gets created due to such implicit links will be a lot more powerful than the current explicit link based web.
Implicit links are lot more powerful when one considers events. Events are inherently more linked with other events thru multiple types of links — spatial, temporal, causal, and informational. In fact much of analysis in many fields is to identify and recognize these implicit links among events. James Burke’s analysis and Freakonomics are two books that emphasize insights gained due to identification of such implicit links.
Here is a picture from his talk emphasizing Latent Web.
