Collective intelligence is a phenomenon that existed in human society for many years. The British mathematician Francis Galton basically discovered collective intelligence when he found out, after averaging all individual guesses, that a crowd of 787 visitors at a county fair indeed accurately guessed the weight of an ox. In his blog Ryan Tomayko provides a text copy of the original article vox populi that appeared in the scientific journal Nature on on March 07, 1907..
In fact, collective intelligence is such a significant issue (particularly on the Internet) that I will devote a whole section of my blog to this topic. Great examples of collective intelligence are Wikipedia, Google and most open source projects for example the content management system behind my blog (WordPress) or the software I use to run this website, which would be Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Even though artificial intelligence and collective intelligence often appear together there is quite a difference between these to concepts. The crowd from Francis Galton or the people contributing to Wikipedia are not artificial at all. On the other hand Google uses the structure from the linked documents on the web and combines this data with artificial intelligence and some heuristics to obtain search engine rankings and gain information and knowledge.
Future articles about collective intelligence will address, discuss and explain these issues in a more detailed way.I will demonstrate what kind of knowledge is already available on the Internet, and I plan to discuss how to use data mining or the ideas from the semantic web to make this knowledge easier accessible to humans.