A Web That Thinks Like You

Growing up in artsy Watertown, Mass., with a prize-winning poet for a mother and sculptor/inventor for a father, Nova Spivack was fascinated by technology and the brain. As a teenager, he and his two best friends would cruise the early Internet with an Apple II looking for networks to hack. And over long walks near his grandparents' log cabin in Estes Park, Colo., Spivack talked about philosophy, politics, and business with Peter F. Drucker, his grandfather and one of the towering management thinkers of the 20th century. Drucker's first great contribution to organizational theory was to make sense of a massive and complex company, General Motors Corp. (GM )

Today Spivack, 38, is trying something similar, but for a far more vast and complicated structure: the Internet. His San Francisco startup, Radar Networks, is one of several outfits launching products that use "Semantic Web" technology to let computers understand the nuances and relationships in information they encounter—in a way, say, that a human knows the difference between a baseball batter and cake batter.