1/97

om.ni.scient  aj [NL omniscient-, omnisciens, back-formation fr. ML omniscientia)
1: having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight 
2: possessed of universal or complete knowledge

-----As a child, I wished that a chip, holding the contents of the entire Library of Congress, were implanted in the back of my head. By merely wishing it, I could have instant recall of any work contained in the big library, any fact in any of the books there. Though advances in human-computer interface consign my dream to the real of science fiction, omniscience is nearly upon us. Unknown to me at the time, the Internet held the key to fulfilling my dream of omniscience.

"Omniscience" commonly means the ability to instantly satisfy the desire to obtain any information. If we had at our disposal an encyclopedia containing all known

We do possess such an encyclopedia. It is the World Wide Web.

facts and works of human endeavor, and moreover, which could quickly and painlessly answer any question we might pose about those facts, such as "Who wrote the opera 'Romeo and Juliet'?", or "What is the capital city of Belize?", then we will have reached omniscience, as it is humanly possible. We do possess such an encyclopedia. It is the World Wide Web. Each month more and more of the sum total of human knowledge is transferred to the Web and indexed by the search engines. Searching on words in the questions already allows one to browse documents mentioning the topic. Today this process is laborious, requiring one to sift through scores of documents; however, soon software will be able to quickly extract the precise information one is looking for from the slew of documents indexed by the search engines. After the process of reading the information is transformed into knowledge. Other software tools will detect relationships among the documents, perhaps constructing a personal library of the topic area, which we may query for answers again and again. Will we be omniscient then? I think the answer is yes.

kL