Quintura: Relationships with Hoops to Jump
September 9, 2009
A reader sent me a link to Quintura. I had looked at this system and turned my attention to more enterprise-centric vendors. I took another look at it this morning (September 7, 2009). I ran a query on the publicly accessible search system. This appears at the top the Quintura interface. My earlier test delivered a result in the form of a relationship map. The father of the hyperbolic relationship map in my mind is Ramana Rao, the former Xerox PARC wizard. His map has been influential and its surfaces in SAS’s “discovery” interface and has pointed Cluuz.com toward its display of connections. I ran a test query for “Microsoft Bing”. The result I saw was:
The results were useful. I then ran a more difficult query. I tried “Microsoft Eugene Agichtein. Dr. Agichtein is working in a little known but quite significant area related to next generation data management. Here is the Quintura display for this query:
Source: http://www.quintura.com. No link to the results appears in the navigation bar in thus Quintura page display.
None of the mapped items pertained to database, dataspace, or data management. I got proper nouns, and I know that the pointer to the people will with some further research eventually lead to useful information. I found this set of discovered tags not too useful for my needs. I kept getting proper nouns, and I needed other words and phrases for this test query. Maybe a consumer would find the tags useful. I found them not particularly useful for the type of research I do.
I then ran the same query on Cluuz.com. Here is a portion of the Cluuz.com output which uses the Yahoo search index:
Bingo. The Cluuz.com system pointed me to a relationship at the University of Washington, prople, and a concept. I was off to the research races.
I then tried the query on one of Google’s “in the wild” search demonstrations. I don’t recall how I got the system to generate this type of output, so I can provide much of a how to in this write up. Here’s what Google delivered for the query “Microsoft Eugene Agichtein”:
Source: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=ww%3A1&q=Microsoft+Eugene+Agichtein&btnG=Search&tbo=1
Okay, better than Quintura.com’s output in my opinion but not as good as the Cluuz.com output.
What’s my take?
First, I don’t think most users find these types of relationship maps easy to use upon first encountering them. A more skilled researcher will be able to make sense out of them. If the maps are too simple like the Quintura and Google implementation, I think that a list of suggestions may be more useful.
Second, in terms of what the systems found “related” to Dr. Eugene Agichtein, the Yahoo index processed by Cluuz.com was more useful. This tells me that Yahoo has a useful index and a lousy way of making the pointers available via Yahoo. The Canadian crowd at Cluuz.com makes Yahoo a more useful service. Too bad Yahoo has not signed a deal with Cluuz.com. Hopefully Cluuz.com will stay in business because I like their tools.
Third, the “regular” Google index has the information I wanted. I did have to use the Advanced Search panel to dig it out of the trillion item Google index (give or take a hundred billion, of course). Google has a major accessibility problem right now. The weird thing that looks like a law sprinkler does not deliver for me.
So, if you want relationship maps, I suggest you use Cluuz.com and skip the flashy displays on other systems until these outfits crack the code successfully.
Stephen Arnold, September 8, 2009
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[…] In addition to suggested queries, the interface provides the user with a tag cloud, which can be quite helpful for many users. I am no patent attorney, but there may be some legal eagle-type conversations about other firms’ use of the system and method set forth in US7,627,582. You can get more information about Quintura from the firm’s Web site at http://www.quintura.com. I wrote about this company in September 2009. […]