Archive for the ‘Semantic Search’ Category

It’s All Semantics: Searching for an Intuitive Internet That Knows What Is Said–and Meant

Monday, November 16th, 2009

If you have any interest in the semantic web, this two page article is worthy of your time.

From an ACM TechNews Summary:

The push to develop the Semantic Web recently received fresh support through a National Science Foundation grant, which has been awarded to researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The $1.1 million grant will support the creation of a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that will allow scientists and researchers to make data from their work available to a larger audience. A Semantic Web would enable researchers to present their searches in a more natural way. A semantic interface would allow a researcher to visit a single research site, describe the desired information, and allow ontologies and semantics to find not only that information, but any relevant related information the research may have overlooked. “The Semantic Web has its own query language that takes advantage of meanings of concepts and their relationships,” says Tom Narock, a faculty research assistant at NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “You ask your question at very high level, and it takes care of filling in the details for you.”

Access the Complete Scientific American Report

Source: Scientific American Report (via ACM TechNews)

Posted in Semantic Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Semantic Search: The European Research Project Named MESH (Part 1)

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

From the Report:

But while there is a phenomenal amount of content, most of it is not that easy to find. Sure, text content can be skimmed or glanced, but audiovisual content has to be viewed in linear time. We cannot easily search inside a film or audio recording for relevant information.

That is changing, and one European project has created the first integrated platform for semantic search that can return results based on the content and context of film and audio files, as well as text.

But European researchers in the MESH project have developed an integrated platform which they say, for the first time, can combine semantic search – or search by the meaning of the words – and a host of associated tools to deliver more relevant information, from a wide variety of sources that can be accessed from an individual user.

[Snip]

These technologies are becoming common in particular knowledge domains, and more are emerging every day, but most relate to the concepts behind text-based documents. The MESH platform sought to use semantic search for every type of media.

On the way, it created some cutting-edge technology. “Our automatic annotation for video, for example, is state of the art,” explains Pedro Concejero, coordinator of the MESH project.

“The annotation system is capable of identifying the general scene setting, such as whether a video is a studio shot or a shot recorded on location. With adequate training, it can also detect (within some error margins) the general topic of the video, such as a scene about an earthquake or a flood. It can also find a number of salient objects within the scene, such as persons or fire, but cannot yet identify consistently objects with great variations in shape or aspect.”

One of the major challenges of the project was a product of its own success: It annotated too much information!

Much More fiin the Complete Report.

We will post Part II as soon as it become available.

See Also: MESH Project Home Page
Several videos are available.

Source: ICT Results

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Multimedia Search, Search News, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Transparent Semantic Search Technology Comes to LexisNexis Patent Searching

Monday, October 12th, 2009

From the Announcement:

LexisNexis today announced the availability of transparent semantic search technology for its full complement of intellectual property (IP) research products – enabling users to find the most precise and relevant patent search results.

Through a development alliance with Dallas-based Pure Discovery, LexisNexis has become the first provider of legal information services to integrate the power of semantic search technology with familiar Boolean search technology, giving the user greater control over the patent research process via a simple, streamlined user interface that matches their typical daily workflow.

[Snip]

The new semantic search solution from LexisNexis and Pure Discovery, however, overcomes such challenges to accomplish four breakthrough objectives in online search:

Transparency: Each query is enhanced by the machine intelligence and shown to the user for their complete understanding and engagement. Increased control: Not only is the semantic search transparent, but users are in control with the ability to add, delete, increase or decrease the importance of all query words (concepts) in a unique visual query interface called a “querycloud.”

Fully federated: While LexisNexis maintains one of the largest full-text patent and non-patent literature databases in the world, its semantic search platform can associate semantic searches to virtually any index, whether it resides internally or on the web.

Scalability: The LexisNexis index includes semantic intelligence from more than 10 million full-text patent documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s patent index, as well as Elsevier journal articles and other documents.

[Snip]

The new technology is now available through the patent research and retrieval service LexisNexis® TotalPatent™ and the automated patent application and analysis product LexisNexis PatentOptimizer. In addition, the functionality is also available through lexis.com.

Source: LN (via Business Wire)

See Also: Learn More About Pure Discovery

Posted in Information Industry, Intellectual Property, Legal, Resources, Search News, Semantic Search | No Comments »

The eScience Revolution: Rensselaer Researchers to Create Semantic Web Platforms for Massive Scientific Collaboration

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From an ACM TechNews Summary

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Web researchers have embarked on the Tetherless World Research Constellation, a project they say will create Semantic Web technology enabling scientists, educators, and people worldwide to access data on various topics in a single place, opening up a new scale of scientific data compilation and sharing. The effort is funded by a $1.1 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Semantic-based Web technologies would enable a computer to supply its own underlying meaning to words and offer links to vast numbers of related sites and other content without human intervention. “With semantics, we can bridge the gap between the question that someone wants to ask in their limited scientific vocabulary and the extreme complexity of the underlying data,” says RPI professor Deborah McGuinness.

Access the Complete Article (via Rensselaer News, Includes Chart)

Posted in Science, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

Semantic Search: Spanish Scientists Develop the First Intelligent Financial Search Engine

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

From the ACM TechNews Summary:

Researchers from Carlos III University of Madrid (UCM3), the University of Murcia, and the Business Institute have jointly created SONAR, a new search engine that examines financial news using semantic technology. The researchers say the program offers a more limited Web search based on specific terms. SONAR also can use logic to link news, prices, and share valuations. The search engine gathers information from Internet and intranet sources, compiles the data in an archive according to category, and then retrieves the information for individual searches. SONAR uses both an interference engine and a natural language processor, which prevents the search results from being too broad and disorganized. The researchers say that because SONAR analyzes a wealth of financial data in a short amount of time, it will prove a useful tool for industry professionals. UC3M’s Juan Miguel Gomez Berbis says that SONAR “will be especially useful to the finance departments of banks and saving banks or to add to an existing search engine added value over its competitors.” The researchers are adding more features to the program and have been asked to develop other industry-specific search engines, such as ones on transportation or biotechnology.

Much More in this Announcement from Carlos III University of Madrid

Posted in Business and Economics, Information Science, Search News, Search Tools, Semantic Search | No Comments »

Search Me: A Look at Wolfram|Alpha

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

A new, 7 page article, from Technology Review is now online.

It’s an in depth (7 web pages) look at the days leading up to and the launch of Wolfram|Alpha.

You’ll find comments from:

+ Stephen Wolfram

+ Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo Labs

+ Ivan Herman, Semantic, Head of Semantic Web for W3C

+ Daniel Weld, Semantic Web Researcher at the U. of Washington

+ Peter Norvig, Google

+ Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley

Direct to Complete Article

Source: Technology Review

Posted in Search News, Search Tools, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet, Web Search | No Comments »

Smarter Searches: Technology Merges Images, Data and Knowledge

Friday, April 17th, 2009

From the Story:

Let’s say you’re looking for a one-bedroom apartment in northeast Dallas that has a grocery store, Catholic church and health club within walking distance, costs less than $800 a month and has both high-speed Internet access and a low crime rate.

Finding that dream apartment could take awhile right now. But technology under development by UT Dallas researchers aims to speed such a search, enabling people to find the perfect place today and move in tomorrow.

The secret lies in merging evolving semantic Web technology with geospatial information systems.

Source: University of Texas-Dallas (via Directions)

Posted in Geographic, Semantic Search | No Comments »

Now Available: Results of the Semantic Web Awareness Barometer 2009

Friday, April 17th, 2009

From the Report Summary:

Between November 1, 2008 and January 22, 2009 the Semantic Web Company in cooperation with the Know Center Graz and the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group of Freie Universität Berlin conducted an online survey on experiences with and expectations towards Semantic Web technologies. The data analysed in this survey was primarily collected among Semantic Web specialists from science and industry.

We recommend to read this report as a snapshot on the development of the Semantic Web. It shall give the reader a brief overview over current trends and possible future topics. It shall provide orientation at a broader scale that helps the reader to compare his/her personal notion of the current development with the aggregated views from other specialists. Beside that, the results of this survey can be used to formulate further hypotheses for testing under more advanced empirical circumstances.

Direct to Full Text Report (13 pages; PDF)

Source: Semantic Web Company (via SemanticaWeb)

Posted in Semantic Search, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Article: The Semantic Web in Education

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

From the Article:

The mantra of the information age has been “The more information the better!” But what happens when we search the web and get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate it? Enter the semantic web, or Web 3.0. Among other things, the semantic web makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable to machines.

Consider a simple example. If you want to know my mailing address, currently you need to go to my web page and root around until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any meaningful way. That is, my address is not coded as “an address,” it is simply presented as a series of characters on the screen. Contrast this with a database about your friends that contains a specific column called “mailing address.” Even if your database included millions of entries, locating my address is easy.

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Posted in Semantic Search, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

The Semantic Web in Education

Friday, March 6th, 2009

From the Article:

What happens when the read-write web gets smart enough to help us organize and evaluate the information it provides?

Source: EDUCAUSE Review

Posted in Semantic Search, Technology and Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Video Lecture: Intelligence in Wikipedia

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

From the Summary:

Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web is hindered by a chicken-and-egg problem, which can be best solved by a bootstrapping method: creating enough structured data to motivate the development of applications. UW CSE believes that autonomously Semantifying Wikipedia is the best way to bootstrap. They choose Wikipedia as an initial data source, because it is comprehensive, high-quality, not too large, and contains enough manually-derived structure to bootstrap an autonomous, self-supervised process. This talk will present their success to date in this endeavor.

The presentation by Dan Weld can be downloaded or streamed online.

Source: University of Washington / ResearchChannel

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet | No Comments »

A New Free Service From Alacra: Street Pulse

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Check out a brief review of a Alacra’s Street Pulse, over at the VIP LiveWire.

What is Street Pulse?

Street Pulse aims to spot business trends, rumours, etc. by mining and applying semantic technology to more than 2000 — and this is important — hand-selected (by Alacra editors) feeds from both mainstream news and alternative sources such as weblogs.

Note from Gary
For those who don’t yet know, I’ve expanded my role with FreePint, the publisher of ResourceShelf, to include vendor and product coverage for VIP, particularly the LiveWire (http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/). You can find industry comment on the LiveWire from VIP’s team of contributing editors.

Get a weekly digest of headlines emailed by subscribing to the LiveWire Digest: http://www.vivavip.com/order/digest/

Posted in Business and Economics, Search News, Semantic Search, Source File | No Comments »

BBC Music talking semantics

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

From the Article:

The BBC is working on an online project that uses open source and semantic web technology to create a comprehensive resource for music fans.

The BBC artists pages, a repository of information on singers and bands played on several BBC radio stations, have been running as a closed beta project since June last year.

Source: Silicon.com

Posted in Search Tools, Semantic Search | No Comments »

Semantic Search Engine Helps Scientists Do Productive Searches

Monday, January 12th, 2009

From the Announcement:

Noesis, a new semantic web search engine developed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, won’t help you find the perfect Charger ragtop, but it is helping scientists who study the environment retrieve the research data they need. It has the potential to help scientists and researchers in many other fields perform more focused and productive searches.

Source: Newswise

See Also: Noesis: A Semantic Search Engine and Resource Aggregator for Atmospheric Science (6 pages; PDF)

Posted in Search News, Search Tools, Semantic Search | No Comments »