Ontotext: The Fabric of Relationships
November 9, 2016
Relationships among metadata, words, and other “information” are important. Google’s Dr. Alon Halevy, founder of Transformic which Google acquired in 2006, has been beavering away in this field for a number of years. His work on “dataspaces” is important for Google and germane to the “intelligence-oriented” systems which knit together disparate factoids about a person, event, or organization. I recall one of his presentations—specifically the PODs 2006 keynote–in which he reproduced a “colleague’s” diagram of a flow chart which made it easy to see who received the document, who edited the document and what changes were made, and to whom recipients of the document forward the document.
Here’s the diagram from Dr. Halevy’s lecture:
Principles of Dataspace Systems, Slide 4 by Dr. Alon Halevy at delivered on June 26, 2006 at PODs. Note that “PODs” is an annual ACM database-centric conference.
I found the Halevy discussion interesting.
You can see an unrelated child innovation of this “contextual” approach in “The Knowledge Discovery Quest.” There is an embedded presentation which describes a contextual approach to figuring out what content is germane to a user’s query. I noted this passage in the write up:
Neither text, nor any type of content could be exhaustively defined by their exact textual representation. They both are more of a fabric of relationships. Not just a mere sum of exact words and phrases, but a network of connected entities.
Worth a look. Side note: Information about Dr. Alon Halevy is tough to locate via the Google.com search system. However, if you are so inclined, there is quite a bit of information about his ideas in the Google patent documents. Also, queries of Bing.com and Yandex.com yield some useful information. I recall telling one Berkeley wizard that Dr. Halevy’s approach to dataspaces was one of the most important developments in information analysis. It is a one of those unfortunate consequences of today’s information stream that much of his work is unfindable by a casual researcher. I think his influence is not widely recognized by some of the people working in this field today. As I said in HonkinNews for November 1, 2016, “Google is circling its wagons”, probably as a defense against encroachment upon some of its capabilities.
Stephen E Arnold, November 9, 2016
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