Given the diversity of human activity, both as individuals and as a society, how can one ever hope to characterize the depth of our interactions?
This is probably the single greatest challenge of implementing a self-organizing system on the Net: How to capture and compare the content (structure and semantics) of information that is exchanged, stored or processed. This is particularly evident given the observation that the same raw piece of information, such as a photo, can have completely different meanings to different people. This was essentially the roadblock of Artificial Intelligence efforts that tried to capture the complexity of human activity, even in a restricted system. What gives us some hope in addressing this challenge is that people, the ultimate processors of complex information, will continue to be part of the process. Hence, the first goal is to capture the activity of humans processing complex information. This has been demonstrated in simple experiments. There is also progress in both characterizing and capturing (automating) the semantics in artificial environments.
