The Knowledge Revolution

The volume of information available worldwide doubles every year. This proliferation of data, available on public and private medias ranging from TV, Internet, databases, video recordings, and sound recording, combined with their heterogeneity (text, voice, image, video, and other digital data) make comprehending and analyzing this information increasingly difficult, thought we know that it is necessary to do so. The exponential growth of information, far from making the environment more intelligible, does the opposite.

After the PC revolution, which made data processing available to everyone, the revolution of mobile telecommunications and the Internet, which enabled individuals to freely communicate with each other and have access to a great amount of data, information research and analysis techniques are creating a third revolution, that of knowledge.

It is important for France, and with it, Europe, to be leaders among the countries that master Intelligent Information Analysis Technologies, including text mining, data mining, image mining, data fusion and extraction, and for them to shape the knowledge engineering market. The stakes are altogether strategic, cultural, and economic. The challenge of exploiting massive quantities of information can be found in many domains, including: defense, information, economic intelligence, intelligent and cognitive human-machine interfaces, multimedia applications, advanced search engines, and more generally the entire content industry (publishing, cinema, video games, etc), the education sector, and more specifically e-education, health (public health warnings and risk prevention), hard drive information retrieval (for individuals and businesses), which represents 100 times online data, the client/business relations sector (Customer Relationship Management), e-government, etc.

Indeed, in 2007 we estimated that this market of information research and analysis would reach 15 billion Euros per year. The United States were clearly positioned in this global market. Google’s commercial success, obtained in less than seven years, is a prime example. This stunning performance yielded a virtual monopoly for mass online information searches, which represented 1.5 billion Internet users surfing an ocean of over 10 billion web pages in 2007. This situation compromises the neutral objective access to information that we generally take for granted. For one, search results are ranked in function of the frequency that the page has been seen, which today favors referencing Anglo-Saxon pages. Further, since Google can select the information available, and with the recently announced digitization of 15 million publically available documents, an Anglo-Saxon vision of the world’s cultural heritage is clearly favored.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg: indeed, the federal state massively invests in advanced research on new intelligent information analysis technologies, essentially for information needs and for anti-terrorism measures, estimating 1 billion dollars a year since 2001. Further, information agencies (CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI, etc.) have advanced systems for multi-source information processing. Finally,  private corporations benefit from these investments and answer by investing right back: IBM, Microsoft, and Google spend hundreds of millions of dollars on developing platforms for integrated processing and to make more advanced search engines.

Community Contact:

François Hanat – francois.hanat@capdigital.com – 00 33 (0)1 40 41 11 89