Yesterday I was able to spend a few minutes on the phone with Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks. If you’re reading this newsletter, you already know that Radar Networks announced its closed beta for Twine, its semantically enabled collaboration and information system.

The Twine effort has already been documented and described in depth, with blog posts, interviews, and articles available online. I wanted to get an overview of the system and eventual plan for its delivery from Nova as a prelude to more extensive coverage here on SemanticReport.

While Twine has been in the works for a few years at this point, according to Nova, this is just the beginning of the journey for the technology. While the initial offering is being introduced for use by individuals and small groups, the company expects to scale the system for use in large enterprises as well.

Nova made a point of explaining that Twine is intended to enable the collaboration process in groups, and to make individuals more productive in the way they access and use information. He compared it to the structure of a Wiki by explaining that wikis depend on individuals to add relevance through tagging and personal interaction, while Twine does all the heavy lifting automatically. If you’ve even done a little bit of work adding tags, keywords, and other meta data, you understand why much of the information on the web is lacking in the kind of information that can help make it semantically useful.

We expect to hear much more about Twine from Nova and from people using the beta system over the next few months. If this is a project you are interested in, let us know. If you happen to be one of the limited number of beta users selected from the more than 20,000 who have requested access, let us know what you experience and how the system works for you.

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