Contact and Document Management

I have been involved in creating a search application for a while. The application was hinging on also becoming a document management system while it enabled users to collaborate on the documents in order to create intelligence based on the raw data contained in the documents. The application did not really make it that far, but after I had taken a step back and thought about what I had been doing for a while. I came to the conclusion that at the basis of all information gathering and collaboration is good contact management.

• We needed some security of course, that is the easiest one of all, but you need to make sure every one is well identified. So that is the mostly easy part. Of course combine this with groups and roles and the like and you are covered. It is of course not as easy as that, but everyone can do at least that much, so it is not that hard.
• What comes next is that not everyone creates data with the same skill and quality of content as everyone else. You must identify who you experts are and what their field of expertise is. Of course one of the issue it that this will change over time. If you have just recruited a new assistant and he is creating documents reflecting his training in a given field, you would want to give priority to the more senior and experienced resources when searching data on that field. You could even go further and privilege any efforts made when several experienced resources collaborate together.
• Of course this seem to apply only at a company level where that information is well known and understood. It seems a bit more difficult to achieve this at the Internet level. We have lots of information about one single document, and potentially about a site as well. I believe we could also collect information about the documents a single person has written and what the subjects are. I believe we collect a list of keywords for each document and who references those documents (for Google anyway). Those keywords could be cross referenced (or not) with fields of expertise.
• The next stage would be to combine that with user feedback. Present them with a top list of expertise they declare themselves to be cognizant about and then have them rate articles, and by extension the authors of those articles. The last stage, or at least the last one I can think of, would be to include social information. I suppose I mean for you to be able to generate a graph of trusted sources for specific subjects. It would be great to be able to be able to use that information for future searches and being able to visualize it as well as customize it. Based on previous document feedback, we could already build such a graph already, but being able to customize it would increase its efficiency. I could define an author I have heard of, without knowing whether there are any articles written by that person. But we could also recommend other authors who have recommended him and are recommended by her.
• The other thing that would be great, would be to be automatically notified when a preferred author has published, but only if the web site is actually related to my interests. If I publish a new picture in Flickr or if I publish a new entry in my blog about the latest coding practice, they do not speak to the same interest and to be honest my photographic skills and not really worth keeping track of.

This is probably too complex to ever be understood by everyone or not many people will actually bother setting all those filters. There must be a compromise here somewhere.