A number of companies are experimenting with software and services that allow users to better navigate around, through and over the mountain of data that comes pouring through our home and work computers every day, in the shape of e-mail, faxes, Web pages and spreadsheets.

Alternative Interfaces

As the sheer number of files increases, the system, invented in Palo Alto, California, brought to us by Apple and made ubiquitous by Windows, becomes even more cumbersome.

Hundreds and sometimes thousands of documents are stored in ways that could hardly be called structured. We are essentially storing information the way we did when FDR was president -- in a bunch of filing cabinets stuffed with folders full of information.

Alternatives to the graphical interface include three-dimensional software, "knowledge maps," "intelligent guides," and even intuitive machines that pay constant attention to our smallest gestures.

Time, The Unstructured Dimension

A product called "Scopeware" from Mirror Worlds Technology automatically arranges computer files in chronological order.

Taking advantage of the human ability to memorize temporal relationships, the most recent files are prominently displayed in the foreground. The system works through a browser rather than as an operating system.

"Time is becoming an increasingly unstructured dimension as the daily workflow of knowledge workers becomes increasingly cluttered and interrupted," Gartner Research said about Scopeware in a report on the state of "personal knowledge organizers."

Star "Trees," Not "Wars"

Inxight offers software and services for "automating the analysis, organization and presentation of information across the Internet, intranets and extranets."

The Santa Clara, California-based company, known for its "Star Tree" maps, has tools for servers that automatically extract metadata -- data about data -- from electronic documents that the company claims increase the speed and accuracy of information searches.

It also has a "summarizer" that identifies key sentences in documents and assembles them into an intelligent summary.

Pictures Over Words?

Many companies, like TheBrain and WebMap Technologies, have developed visual schematics for locating information on the Web, replacing the time-consuming and often frustrating textual method.

WebMap has a browser plug-in that displays Web sites and pages as items on a topographic map. It looks like a deep-space photo of a solar system, but the user can zoom in and out of information quickly.

ThinkMap has software that gives the user a rotating Web that floats related information around a central selection, instead of forcing users to flip through pages of listings.

Baby BlueEyes

The big players, too, have long recognized a need for evolutionary interfaces -- remember Microsoft Bob from 1995? Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) now has Data Mountain, a three-dimensional mountain that utilizes human spatial memory instead of temporal memory.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been developing BlueEyes (motto: "Creating computers that know how you feel."). BlueEyes uses "non-obtrusive" sensing technology, such as video cameras and microphones, to scrutinize users' facial expressions and physical gestures, trying to determine their physical, emotional or "informational" state.

The example IBM uses is of a user making eye contact with a BlueEyes-equipped television. The technology activates itself and the user tells it to turn to CNN. If the TV then "sees" the user frown, it knows it has erred, and would explain it didn't understand the request. The user could then explain he meant CNN Headline News.

On the other hand, if the user smiles, the TV would know it had satisfied the request.