A jumble of thoughts as I ease into the day, starting with a phrase that occurred to me walking the dog last night…I’d just picked up an email from Stephen relating to wikimindmap, which I’d rehashed to display an OpenLearn Unit navigation in mindmap format .Stephen commented that a tension arises when displaying a link collection scraped from a page in a simple hierarchy, because not all links are equal: “Two links look the same to a wiki, but to a concept map one is a major link while the other is minor, subsidiary.”I agree with this, but still think there’s mileage in starting somewhere and then seeing how we can improve matters through structure, or cunning…The semantic web may or may not be just around the corner.What struck me whilst walking the dog was where the semantics could be applied. I’ve just read David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, where he writes at length about sorting on the way out rather than indexing on the way in.You can listen to an interview with David Weinberger on IT Conversations (how come IT Conversations don’t having sharing/embed code??), see the book tour presentation at Google TechTalks:or see David Weinberger in conversation with Bradley Horowitz via the YUI Theatre:”Sorting on the way out, rather than indexing on the way in…”It struck me that if we get regular expressions in search queries (as in Google code search), then it becomes possible to write quite complex filters that over time will give some approximation to semantic search, whilst being incrementally useful.So for example, with regular expression for a postcode or zipcode applied as a search limit, I could narrow down on “where is” type queries (in the US and UK at least!).For some time, many of the search engines have been supporting question asking/fact returning queries (for example: population of England or capital of france (see more examples on the In Search of Google playlist)). …

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