Cloud, Semantics, and Cancer Fighting
July 10, 2010
There has been some progress that shares semantic Web and cloud technology in detecting lung cancer. The National Cancer Institute’s Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) and the non profit Canary foundation are working together here. This reported in Semanticweb.com.
The preliminary tests have been so encouraging in fact, the combined effort is looking to move forward and get NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to analyze the results. The project is hoping to use the computer technology to analyze at least some of the results that it has, and for humans to be able to collaborate on the collected results to see if cloud computing can someday combat lung cancer.
This is obviously something that’s starting out in its infancy stage, but to even consider that a dent can be made in the 157,300 lung cancer deaths that are forecast for 2010 using a computer driven approach is encouraging.
Rob Starr, July 10, 2010
Open Source: Frisky Like Ben Franklin in France?
July 10, 2010
Several newspapers tossed aside their proprietary software for a day in order to produce an entire edition strictly from open source material. And we have Ben Franklin to thank for it. Saratoga Springs, NY’s daily paper, the Saratogian, recently detailed its foray into open source world in an article, “Ben Franklin Day at the Saratogian”. The results were a newspaper that offered the same high-quality look and layout of previous editions, but made completely from open source word processing, pagination and photo editing tools. Part publicity stunt, part open source boot camp, this event was part of the Ben Franklin Project that aims to help newspapers get more of an online presence.
This is an intriguing story that tosses more credibility toward open source programs and hammers in another coffin nail for expensive, difficult proprietary software.
Pat Roland, July 10, 2010
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Social Media Gives eDiscovery Indigestion
July 10, 2010
It seems everyone loves Facebook, Twitter and all the social media tools at our disposal. Everyone except e-discovery, that is. A recent ZD Net article, “Social Media a Nightmare for e-Discovery,” detailed growing difficulties for litigation discovery, which requires all relevant documents be submitted in court and reviewed. According to one electronic discovery representative, social media is, “creating phenomenal difficulties because you have employees creating information in pockets that are not controlled by general corporate governance policy, on servers that are generally not owned by a company and can often really skirt the edges of a company’s IP or relevant business documentation.”
This news isn’t surprising, since it seems every time technology opens a door for people, that same technology slams some windows shut. But, problems like this are what makes technology exciting because it often sparks innovation.
Do we need more evidence that casual assurances that social content is not big problem for search and content processing systems. Will an azure chip consultant endorse eDiscovery products that lack essential functionality? Does a byte reside on a solid state disc?
Pat Roland, July 10, 2010
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Australia, Street View, and Another Apology
July 9, 2010
I saw in the Official Google Australia Blog this headline, “We’re Sorry.” I thought I had seen that headline before. (Is this that day-ja view thing my neighbors in Kentucky talk about?) The addled goose gets confused when confronted with more mea culpas than a priest in the Spanish inquisition would hear on a typical day in a church basement in Castile.
Here’s the paragraph I noted:
In Australia, we have been working with the Privacy Commissioner to support her investigation into what happened. We welcome today’s conclusion of this investigation, and as a result we have committed to working even more closely with them going forward on the privacy implications of our product launches. We want to reiterate to Australians that this was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do and we have to earn that trust every single day. We are acutely aware that we failed badly here.
A crisis public relations expert I met a decade ago was an advocate of apologizing and putting the problem behind you.
Source: http://mosalyo.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/mea-culpa.jpg
The problem with this American’s approach to crisis management is that the method may not work as planned in other countries and cultures. One good example may be Australia. I don’t know much about Australia or law enforcement, of course. But I have heard that some authorities in Australia are sometimes quite strict in their approach to law enforcement.
Will the Google apology cut much ice in the land down under. I don’t think the German authorities were not amused with the Google Street View Wi Fi issue.
And, Australians, despite the silliness of 1986 film “Crocodile Dundee”, can be quite a handful when irritated. Could Google become a red kangaroo with Australian authorities giving chase with automatic weapons ready to fire? The Australia – Google dust up will be interesting to watch. In those red kangaroo hunts, the red kangaroos don’t win too often.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2010
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Google Gets a Yes in Its Chinese Fortune Cookie
July 9, 2010
Short honk: The BBC reported that Google has a Web page license. “Google Says China License Renewed by Government” noted:
Google has had a long history of run-ins with the Chinese authorities, but without a license granted by Beijing, it cannot operate in China. “Our operations in China are completely at the discretion of the Chinese government,” Mr. Schmidt has said.
Our view from the goose pond is that China sent Google a message. In diplomatic terms, I think this means that Google’s fortune cookie contain some good news. However, Google will get hungry again and have to order another Chinese meal. What will that meal’s fortune cookie say?
The license is a reminder that China is a country and Google is a company. Get too frisky and could the Chinese chef insert something quite surprising in the fried rice?
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2010
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Privacy as a Competitive Advantage
July 9, 2010
Short honk: Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy may have contributed to the firm’s summer doldrums in the 18-35 demographic. Google, adopting what reminds me of a proud ostrich,sees the world from its point of view. Duck Duck Go has taken a cue from these two companies and made privacy a competitive advantage. Point your browser at the Duck Duck go Privacy Policy. What I find interesting is that the company is probing a sensitive issue. Oracle has used a similar method with its “secure enterprise search” positioning. I think these two companies have a good idea. Perhaps Duck Duck Go will have more success with the approach than Oracle?
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2010
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Lucid Rivets a Search Deal
July 9, 2010
A promising merger in the open source enterprise search world could have serious reverberations for computer users. A Yahoo! News article, “Rivet Logic and Lucid Imagination Partner to Deliver Innovative Enterprise and Search Solutions,” broke the story that Rivet Logic, a leader in open source content management, and enterprise search powerhouse Lucid Imagination, plan to fuse both operations together. This is an effort to deliver a host of software and solutions for innovative enterprise search applications aimed at customers focused on open source programs. “Rivet Logic’s expertise in delivering content-rich solutions,” the article stated, “coupled with Lucid Imagination’s certified distributions of Lucene/Solr and commercial-grade support and training services, will offer organizations the enterprise-class stability and support they’re looking for.”
In a world of head-scratching mergers and acquisitions, it’s exciting to see a combination that makes so much sense and offers such exciting possibilities.
Pat Roland, July 9, 2010
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Avoiding the AP and Its Copyright Hummer
July 9, 2010
It shouldn’t really be surprising that a recent article in Techdirt.com is still highlighting the position by a particular patent attorney when it comes to open source versus proprietary software.
According to the blogger who took the time to dissect the blog from patent attorney Gene Quinn, open source software is actually a hindrance to innovation and some patent holders can claim willful infringement if the party involved had seen their patent.
Legal arguments aside, we’re not sure that the premise for the whole debate is sound, at least from the perspective of Gene Quinn. How can constant innovation not be considered one of the foundations that drives American business forward? The blogger who takes umbrage to this correctly implies that innovation doesn’t require an original idea, just the ability to solve a market need.
The goslings at Beyond Search try to avoid the Associated Press, which could drive its Hummer right over the addled goose and the scrawny little ones. Life is too short for that.
Rob Starr, July 9, 2010
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Vertical Search: Music and the Potential for a Stubbed Toe
July 9, 2010
“Search Engines Turn to Music” presents a very post modern view of vertical search. A vertical search system would have been in 1980 a commercial database with an editorial policy. The idea was that a particular database like Investext would have information in it that was homogeneous. Investext, for instance, contained analysts reports chopped into 3 Kb pages. When I needed information from an investment firm’s analyst reports, I would use Investext. I liked the product so much, ABI/INFORM teamed with Investext to explain when to use each commercial database. Today, search engines have rediscovered an editorial policy. As the write up in Stuff makes clear, the 2010 approach includes some new wrinkles.
For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
According to Microsoft, 10 percent of all Internet search queries are entertainment-related, with music lyrics alone accounting for 70 percent of those searches.
Where there are users, there will be monetization opportunities in the post Napster world. I also noted this segment:
BPI, the trade group representing UK record labels, raised the stakes in June by issuing a takedown notice to Google, demanding it remove links to 17 songs from third-party websites it deems infringing, such as RapidShare and MegaUpload.
Yikes. More legal hassles for the Google. What’s clear is that cloud based, for fee music and rich media services are the future.
Useful article, but I am not sure that search engines have turned to music. My view is that search engines are finding that some of the old tricks still have the capacity to interest users. The vertical angle is important. A copyright misstep could lead to a bone crushing collision with the pavement. And what about the bruises when giants collide in the contentious rich media market?
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2010
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Sophia Search Lands Venture Funding
July 9, 2010
Wisdom is a good name for a search and content processing system. If you live in rural Kentucky, the Greek becomes “Sophia”, which denotes wisdom. (Gentle reader, “wisdom” is not highly prized in Harrod’s Creek.)
The news that Sophia Search (founded in 2007) landed $1.2 million in seed money reached me via Marketwire. The investors include Volcano, based in Belfast, and Javelin Ventures in London. The story’s title was effective in arresting my attention: “Sophia Search Secures Largest Angel Investment in Northern Ireland to Address Global Demand for Next-Generation Enterprise Search and Discovery.” The news item said:
Sophia’s technology is purpose built on the company’s unique, patented, Contextual Discovery Engine (CDE) based on the linguistical model of Semiotics, the science behind how humans understand the meaning of information in context. The CDE platform automatically detects relationships and themes in unstructured content to enable organizations to seamlessly search, extract, deduplicate and eliminate redundancy of content to minimize risk and reduce the cost of retrieving, storing and managing enterprise information.
The news story revealed that Sophia is built on a patented, next-generation search engine platform. The system can “automatically discover relationships and themes in unstructured content.”
The company, according to my notes, is a spin out from University of Ulster and Saint Petersburg State University. Sophia Search was one of the companies recognzed by the PricewaterhouseCooper entrepreneur competition. (Keep in mind that I do work for the outfit that help PricewaterhouseCoopers conduct these entrepreneur competitions.)
A quick trip to our Overflight system yielded some useful nuggets about this company. The Sophia Search white paper, dated January 2009, pointed out that the method is “fundamentally different to [sic] any other search tool.” The white paper continued:
These tools are based on ideas & principles drawn from disciplines such as Signal Processing or Mathematics. These ideas are ‘borrowed’ from these disciplines and applied to text retrieval to provide search. In Sophia we believe that in order to retrieve useful information for users we must first understand its meaning and as such we build Sophia upon the recognised linguistical model of Semiotics.
The system “understands” the context in which a word or phrase is used. The white paper said: “In order to understand the meaning of a word it must be taken within the context of other words around it.” We agree. Key word indexing is one reason why most search systems drive users to distraction.
The white paper introduces the idea of “intertextuality”. Here’s what the Sophia white paper says:
All texts are rehashes of previously existing ones and in order to understand them properly they must be read within the context of all information available that is related to them.
Many search engines remain ignorant of what has been previously processed. Google’s programmable search engine includes a context server which addresses this problem in the context of Ramanathan Guha’s method. But Google does not as far as I know offer its context server technology to third parties. Sophia’s engineers are heading down an interesting path in my opinion.
The system processes content, picks out key themes, and then clusters the pointers into “themes”. The idea is that a search rturns content which is “topically similar”. According to the write up in the University of Ulster’s U2B newsletter (Winter 2007), Dr. David Patterson, one of the founders of the company, revealed:
Sophia just doesn’t ind relevant information for customers, it also empowers them with an understanding of the meaning of the information returned. Using conventional search is akin to using a torch in a dark room (the torch represents the search engine and the room, an organisation’s information). Only the parts of the room that have the beam of light focussed on them can be seen at any one time, with limited understanding of the information in view. Using SOPHIA is like licking the switch for a bright ceiling light. The whole room can be seen and all information understood at once.
If you are into technical papers, you can get a feel for the system’s method in “Sophia: An Interactive Cluster-Based Retrieval System for the OHSUMED Collection,” published in 2005.
With some search systems fading, new entrants often find eager audiences. Will Sophia become a break out solution? We wish the Sophia team the best.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2010
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