May 14, 2009 9:03 am
Published by Fran
ISKO UK’s KOnnect blog notes that at least Google is taking metadata seriously. Chatting about Wolfram Alpha the other day, it was pointed out to me that specialist knowledge for a general audience is actually a very niche area, and this is the source of the hype. You need to persuade your VC funders you are revolutionary, when actually you have a very tricky business model. Serious researchers will be using specialised systems already and most people want to look up things like train times rather than atomic weights of elements, so your market is people like students and journalists,... Read more »
May 7, 2009 8:07 am
Published by Fran
BBC NEWS | Technology | Web tool ‘as important as Google’. Here’s a new search tool that will – apparently – be “like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results”. Dr Wolfram says: “Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain…It computes answers – it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.” It is clearly a very sophisticated search engine – I imagine it has a bit of natural language processing with some “mashup” algorithms – and all such developments are very... Read more »
May 4, 2009 12:11 pm
Published by Fran
I’ve just discovered the Librarian of Fortune blog, and found these two useful posts on specialised search engines: Searching the deep web and Legal Research Engine.
May 1, 2009 7:00 am
Published by Fran
In Beyond retrieval: A proposal to expand the design space of classification, Melanie Feinberg argues that classifications are not just about efficient retrieval, but about mapping a conceptual space as an active part of problem-solving or design. A classification highlights connections and contrasts, and fuzzy boundaries, so seems to me to be an obvious tool to help analysis. Comparing different classifications can also illustrate different aspects of an idea or domain. I am very used to the principle of building classifications, seeing how things fit, looking at the things that don’t fit, throwing the classification away, and starting again. You... Read more »
April 28, 2009 3:24 pm
Published by Fran
Content Based Image Retrieval – Google and Similar Image Search | Synaptica Central is a useful critique of the state of Google’s new similar images search, which doesn’t seem to be that good yet. I hope it’s not my fault for ruining their metadata with all the daft things I type into the totally addictive Google Image Labeler!
April 25, 2009 2:39 pm
Published by Fran
I went to the ISKO event on Thursday. The speaker, Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge was very entertaining. He has already blogged about the lecture himself. He pointed out that humans are great at pattern recognition (“intuition is compressed experience”) and are great satisficers (computers are great at optimising), and that humans never read or remember the same word in quite the same way (has anyone told Autonomy this?). I suppose this is the accretion of personal context and experience affecting your own understanding of the word. I remember as a child forming very strong associations with names of people... Read more »
April 21, 2009 9:08 am
Published by Fran
Here’s a straightforward mini-review of the state of semantic search from the Truevert search engine, dividing semantic search techniques into four groups, with no mention of digital essences or other mysticism.
April 13, 2009 4:11 am
Published by Fran
Ever pondered what exactly something meant? Not sure if you’d missed some subtext subtlety or failed to grasp a nuance of technical term usage? Wonder no more. The merger of Autonomy and Interwoven will explain it all. According to Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, in an interview published in Information World Review in March, the merger “will let Autonomy put its technology inside Interwoven products and make them capable of understanding meaning….meaning-based computing extracts the digital essence of information and understands the meaning of content and interactions.” I really need to get my hands on the new... Read more »
April 12, 2009 4:41 pm
Published by Fran
People ask me what I think about folksonomies from time to time and now I can direct them to this article which I was delighted to write for the very useful FUMSI (Find, Use, Manage, Share Information).
April 9, 2009 6:14 am
Published by Fran
I found Communities of Practice (CoP) by Etienne Wenger to be one of those strange books that lots of people told me I must read – and it is relevant to taxonomy work (although this post digresses) – but when I did read it, it all seemed so totally obvious I could hardly believe it had taken until the 1980s to be formulated. Barbara Rogoff and Jean Lave also pioneered the thinking, but I feel sure the ideas must date back at least to medieval trade guilds. It is one of the odd features of academia that sometimes the obvious... Read more »