A Universe of Good Intentions, A World of Practical Hurdles

Digital Universe revolves around mini-sites, called portals, that cover specific topics. Visitors move among these sites by clicking on 3-D images in a visual directory presented at the bottom of the screen. While it has only 40 portals so far, the directory is designed to eventually hold hundreds of thousands of them, along with even more links to external Web pages. A co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has been recruited to supervise the encyclopedia part of Digital Universe.

Only people acknowledged as experts by their peers will build the main subject portals, but each area will also contain encyclopedia entries that can be written by the public. Submissions that have not been vetted and approved by experts will be clearly identified as such.

A team at Boston University has created one of the first main subject areas, called the Earth Portal.

"The Earth Portal is meant to grow to be the largest trusted information resource about the Earth and its environment in history," says Cutler Cleveland, the Boston University professor leading that team.

Cleveland, who is also director of Boston University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, chose to participate because he saw a need for more trustworthy Web guides. He confronts the problem regularly when he asks students in his environmental science classes to develop informed opinions on climate change. They usually start at Google, he said, and then "trudge into my office and say, 'These people say the Earth is going to end next Thursday at 3 o'clock, and other people say climate change is going to be good for the planet.' "

I, too, thought Digital Universe sounded promising when I first heard about it at a conference three years ago. I loved the idea of shortcuts allowing me to learn about, say, Saturn's largest moon without having to type "Titan'' into a search box and wade through thousands of links. Mousing over images of Saturn's moons seemed like it would be easy.

But the Web is a finicky place, and creating ways to get around it is hard. The Digital Universe designers don't seem to have the hang of it yet, not by a long shot.

In mousing over the Saturn pages, for example, I found the images of its moons confusing and slow to load. Clicking on the external Web links in the "explore" window loaded visual tours of Saturn designed by other people -- so there was little visual consistency and too many graphics staring me in the face. The visual navigation seemed more impediment than aid.

Yet Digital Universe also represents another intriguing experiment -- its self-organizing group of Web editors. The foundation is setting up coalitions of experts, who will select other experts, who in turn will pick other editors to supervise their subject areas.

It bears watching how well the specialists can collaborate with the public. Firmage contends that the Digital Universe combines the best of both worlds -- the grass-roots Web and the peer-review systems of academia.

I look forward to seeing if they collide, mesh or reach a standoff.

Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atwalkerl@washpost.com.