It’s the year 300 BC. An illustrious stranger puts one last touch to a parchment that represents 200,000 kilometers of road, 555 cities, rivers and mountains. It covers the entire Roman Empire, the Near East, India, China and even Switzerland. A colossal work for that time.
Lost, then found and copied in the 13th century, this document is known under the name of Peutinger Table. It is a commercial map that represents the communication channels of that time.
Its most notable aspect is that it is rather unfaithful to the landscapes but is much more faithful to the distances and routes. It’s not a map of places, it’s a map of networks. The knowledge acquired by travelers and other merchants has been collected and symbolized in this format to be shared. Because the objective of a map is to produce a concise and effective representation. It simplifies complex phenomena, such as a commercial network, to provide a rapid and relevant understanding.
So what does this have to do with artificial intelligence? Let us remember Antonio Damasio’s quote:
“the human brain is a born cartographer” and let us remember that the mechanism of self-organization inspired by the brain’s biology offers an automatic method to map out perceived signals.
So why restrict ourselves to mapping space? If mapping is a universal principle naturally adopted by living organisms then it must be applicable to any
information. Not just geographic information but all information. It’s the map of knowledge. That is what InspireMe is.
InspireMe
InspireMe is your world of knowledge.
Thanks to its Perception module, it is able to read the documents you provide and then represent them on the map with the principle of what is alike, assembles. Without any reading or manual intervention on your part, InspireMe surfaces dominant themes. These dominant themes are territories from which you can orient yourself in your knowledge. That’s the bottom of the map.
The power of InspireMe lies in the fact that the map of knowledge is to produce by self-organization. No prior knowledge need be provided to get an outline of the dominant themes emerging from themselves like so many territories left to explore.
InspireMe is also a navigation tool that provides an immediate estimate of the number of documents relative to each territory. A simple layer is all it takes to immediately see the location of the documents.
But that’s not all. InspireMe is not just an exploration engine. It also knows how to inspire you, to make suggestions that you didn’t immediately think about but that are related to the documents you are exploring.
