Semantic Search Failure Rate: 50% and There Is Another Watson Search System

June 1, 2015

The challenge of creating a semantic search system is a mini Mt. Everest during an avalanche. One of the highest profile semantic search systems was Siderean Software. The company quietly went quiet several years ago. I thought about Siderean when I followed up on a suggestion made by one of the stalwarts who read Beyond Search.

That reader sent me a link to a list of search systems. The list appeared on AI3. I could not determine when the list was compiled. To check the sticking power of the companies/organizations on the list, we looked up each vendor.

The results were interesting. Half of the listed companies were no longer in the search business.

Here’s the full list and the Beyond Search researcher’s annotations:

Search System Type
Antidot Finder Suite Commercial vendor
BAAGZ Not available
Beagle++ Not available
BuddyFinder (CORDER) Search buddyspace and Jabber
CognitionSearch Emphasis on monitoring
ConWeaver Customer support
DOAPspace Search not a focus of the site
EntityCube Displays a page with a handful of ideographs
Falcons Search system from Nanjing University
Ferret Open source search library
Flamenco A Marti Hearst search interface framework
HyperTwitter Does not search current Twitter stream
LARQ Redirects to Apache Jena, an open source Java framework for building Semantic Web and Linked Data applications
Lucene Apache Lucene Core
Lucene-skos Deprecated; points visitor to Lucene
LuMriX Medical search
Lupedia 404 error
OntoFrame Redirect due to 404 error
Ontogator Link to generic view based RDF search engine
OntoSearch 404 error
Opossum Page content not related to search
Picky Search engine in Ruby script
Searchy A metasearch engine performing a semantic translation into RDF; page updated in 2006
Semantic Search 404
Semplore 404
SemSearch Keyword based semantic search. Link points to defunct Google Code service
Sindice 404
SIREn 404
SnakeT Page renders; service 404s
Swangler Displays SemWebCentral.org; last update 2005
Swoogle Search over 10,000 ontologies
SWSE 404
TrueKnowledge 404
Watson Not IBM; searches semantic documents
Zebra General purpose open source structured text indexing and retrieval engine
ZoomInfo Commercial people search system

The most interesting entry in the list is the Watson system which seems to be operating as part of an educational institution.

Here’s what the Open.ac.uk Watson looks like:

image

IBM’s attorneys may want to see who owns what rights to the name “Watson.” But for IBM’s working on a Watson cookbook, this errant Watson may have been investigated, eh, Sherlock.

Stephen E Arnold, June 1, 2015

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