Thought Leadership http://www.kubernetes.co.uk/2006/06/07/half-life-of-relevance-of-information/ http://www.kubernetes.co.uk/2006/06/07/half-life-of-relevance-of-information/#comments Wed, 07 Jun 2006 06:41:03 +0000 Jeremy http://www.kubernetes.co.uk/?p=18 The discussions about communicating knowledge (digital communications) have brought me back to a concept that I first presented 10 years ago; The Half-life of Relevence of Information.

My definition of this is the the time it takes for half of the information contained in a document to become irrelevant.

For example the half life of relevance of information for…

  • a daily newspaper is probably no more than 48 hours in most cases.
  • Henry V by William Shakespeare is over 400 years as it is just as relevant today as it was when it was written

The key variables here are time and relevance. Relevance is subjective, Henry V is likely to be more relevant to the English rather than the Chinese; and more relevant to an actor than a geologist.

Once you start thinking about it, the concept could be very useful in context and individually sensitive searching. Perhaps this is something that the semantic web will or could deliver.

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