This blog, and the collection of esteemed writers herein, came together as a result of annual events that FAST Search & Technology sponsored, focused on Enterprise 2.0- related issues. In 2008, the last year before being purchased by Microsoft, Chief Technology Officer Bjørn Olstad offered a wonderful vision that FAST was working toward. Recast below, I’ve pulled a number of key quotes for review.

The theme of FASTforward ‘08 was “The User Revolution”. Based on what Bjørn spoke of then, one has to wonder what has happened to the potential of that revolution.

…previously people thought that intent was what they typed in a query box…And now people are seeing that intent can be captured in many ways. It can be what you type, it can be what you do, it can be how you collaborate with other people, it can be you as a person, it can be the team you work in… How do you capture intent? How do you act on intent?

Power is switching from a publishing perspective to a consumer perspective. That is a big challenge…

Bjørn explained that over time FAST had been focused more on the back end than the front end — the interaction space. And that they committed to a shift to the front end through their release of an Interaction Management module, part of their overall planned architecture.

If you can work on developing the user experience, that adds so much more value than developing deep in the core. So over time we have shifted most of the focus to create that richness about how search is powering actual algorithmic experiences far beyond what people believe was search — in portals, in deep applications, in rich applications — being powered by algorithms.

In the past, applications have kept various types of content, structured data and media as separate elements. FAST wanted to break down the barriers between these.

We have a new search core which is taking this to the next level…unstructured data, text, rich media all blended together but natively represented, and query languages of all types to access this that are also native.

…you get a new level of completeness, a data fusion model where you work on all types of data and it works on all types of queries, coming from applications (legacy) and users.

He goes on to talk about the significance of tags, but not only explicit tags, but things that can be inferred from behaviors.

That connection between work — that ability to tap into usage and convert that into metadata, implicit metadata, that subsequently can power more precise user experiences — has also been a key method.

He spoke of the difference of doing so at the individual levels and also making inferences at a team level (more social implications), moving lastly to the crowd level (wisdom of crowds implications).

In reflecting on the evolution of search, Bjørn notes while many companies have leveraged search as a mechanism for revenue generation, search can be leveraged as a business platform:

So it’s not just a technology — how can I put a search bar in the upper right-hand corner — this has become a platform as to how I can run my media company. Because the core assets have been changing. It used to be the content: I own the newspaper. Now…the power is with the user. How can they reach out to the user? Search is a key technology to do that.

It’s not just like the web search — you type a query, you get a list of links, you click on it and then you go and read it. What if it was quantitative? What if the value is not just in any document but is across documents and it’s only when you bring these pieces together that you actually see a pattern? …to get to a new level of analysis…bypassing the current BI level approach…using a much simpler access paradigm…

Talking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 that had already started to be seen across the market, Bjørn noted that even for the adoption of SharePoint, collaboration is one of the top 4 focuses. From a search perspective you can close the loop on things that go beyond the content itself and can look at the use of the content to infer value.

At that time, looking to the future of FAST Bjørn said:

The next generation technology for FAST has 3 pillars, 3 cornerstones…content [how can we aggregate it]…the user [search moves from being an API for content to something that can be managed directly]…a search core [changing the physics of search]

We need to rethink information access: is it databases, is it search, is it a business platform? This is really now changing and the technology stack is going to change forever, based on these components.

I really miss these events. The energy was tremendous.

If FAST was already moving toward this reality in early 2008, complete with customers demonstrating same, how is it that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to sell a similar vision at TED in early 2009, touted as the Next Web and Linked Data?

And what happened to all this forward momentum? Have we buried critical technologies again?