Innovate by Automating

There can be no doubt that development of capacity to store and transmit digital data is absolutely necessary for Canada, but it won't be enough to spur productivity or prosperity, nor launch Canada into a world leadership position. (I am referring to all types of data — text, numeric, audio, video). Canada can take it to the next level by recognizing the real issue: increasingly overwhelming amounts of data and information. Data only becomes useful when it is extracted and analyzed in ways that are humanly significant, but that becomes difficult when there's simply too much of it. Canada could enrich itself by fostering development of technologies to automate human intellectual processes, such as the semantic web and serious gaming engines, in order to handle the data deluge.

As a small example, how will all of the content collected in response to this call for ideas and submissions be analyzed? If it is to be read and reported on by people, it will probably take several months. What if it could be done in a week or two? Suitable technology has the potential to make analysis and evaluation of data much more efficient. It is interesting to note that one automation tool is already being used on the Digital Economy website: the voting feature on the Digital Economy website. It "crowdsources" the evaluation of the ideas and automatically collects this valuable data. It's just a small indication of what could be accomplished if Canada fuels the development of intelligent automated processing of digital data.