SMEs know the right Keywords

Somewhere in the course of my career, I spent a good bit of time working on "Information Retrieval" projects.  I think my first one was a search enhancer while working for a linguistic software company, but in reality, much of my earlier work experience was also related to building searchable repositories for information.  My Capstone project was also an Information Retrieval project.

And even before that, I was an expert at finding things in books because I could remember WHICH book had the answer, and how to find the right page using the index.

A recent Facebook post I ran across asks: "Badly explain your day job".  I should have responded with the image above.

I suppose part of it is translating questions into Google and Stacktrace queries, but it's not just "JFGI".  A lot of the time it's translating the querant's request into terms that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in a particular art would use to answer the question.  I'm not an expert so much of in terms of what I know, so much as in what I know how to find out.  Yes, I have encyclopedic memory of the CDA R-MIM, and a few other things, but I don't keep that on the top of my memory, instead, I know where to find what I need.

The CDA Book came about so that I'd have a list of those things that I need for my work in print form by my desk (and yours).  This blog came about for some of the same reasons.  I know I wrote something about that, where the heck did I put it.

If Web 2.0 is the Semantic web, and Web 3.0 is some Block chain related thing, Web 4.0 should be the translator of simple questions into expert answers, and if we get there, we will also have solved the Touring problem.  Because to do what I do as a significant part of my day job, is to get INSIDE the head of the querent, figure out what they are really trying to do or understand, and then, get the expert answer and translate it back into something that they'll understand ... the Freshman lecture version if possible.