Nuxeo and Its Semantic Technology Revs Up
September 16, 2010
There are semantic engines with Web-based APIs, but here’s one with an open source license for offline use or within a private infrastructure. We found the article “Nuxeo Present FISE, a RESTful Semantic Engine” on H-online.com, give an insight into the Furtwangen IKS Semantic Engine (FISE) with a RESTful interface.
A typical semantic engine would process and categorize documents, based on the suggested tags, and even extract known or unknown entities like people or places. However, what FISE does is:
allow developers to run their own semantic engine which offers Web based access to the engine with a /engines endpoint allowing a user to submit text for analysis and view the results, a /stores endpoint to view stored and processed documents and a /sparql endpoint for making SPARQL queries of the stored documents.
The future looks bright for FISE with the addition of multi-lingual support, relationship extraction, and integration. This is all interesting stuff, and we will monitor the kind of impact it will have on the Web and real time search space.
Harleena Singh, September 16, 2010
Exalead Anchors US International Trade Commission
September 14, 2010
Drowning in a sea of data, one government agency recently had a life preserver tossed its way from one of the search industry’s best and brightest. “U.S. International Trade Commission Selects Exalead CloudView as Primary Search Engine” said:
USITC end user site surveys indicated that people couldn’t easily find the information they were looking for on http://www.usitc.gov via its search function. In 2009, USITC decided to replace its previous search software and reviewed a number of other enterprise search options for a solution that met its needs, was easy to administer, and fit its budget.
The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) (http://www.usitc.gov) handles issues of global and domestic trade with its quasi-judicial authority. In doing so, the agency collects massive quantities of data that both employees and visitors to its site needed to access.
The solution was Exalead CloudView, which “uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud.” For the USITC, specifically, CloudView aimed to provide two very specific functions. First, it gave outside users access to over 40,000 documents ranging from PDFs, spreadsheets, Word docs and more. Secondly, CloudView gave employees the ability to search file systems, folders and data repositories that, previously, had to be searched for in a time-consuming manual process.
The result is a highly efficient enterprise and web combination that improves the agency’s ability to monitor trade around the globe. The new system increased the range of available information, boosted performance and provided much-needed speed and simplicity to the Web site.
This is not only a big win for Exalead.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2010
Freebie
Quick and Dirty Sentiment Analysis
September 14, 2010
I thought “Most Common Words Unique to 1 Star and 5 Star App Store Reviews” provides some insight into how certain sentiment analysis systems work. The article said:
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
Frequency count against a “field”. Here are the results for positive apps:
awesome, worth, thanks, amazing, simple, perfect, price, everything, ever, must, iPod, before, found, store, never, recommend, done, take, always, touch
How do you know a loser?
waste, money, crashes, tried, useless, nothing, paid, open, deleted, downloaded, didn’t, says, stupid, anything, actually, account, bought, apple, already
“Sentiment” can be disceerned by looking for certain words and keeping count. So much for rocket science of “understanding unstructured text.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2010
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RSS Readers Dead? And What about the Info Flows?
September 13, 2010
Ask.com is an unlikely service to become a harbinger of change in content. Some folks don’t agree with this statement. For example, read “The Death Of The RSS Reader.” The main idea is that:
There have been predictions since at least 2006, when Pluck shut its RSS reader down that “consumer RSS readers” were a dead market, because, as ReadWriteWeb wrote then, they were “rapidly becoming commodities,” as RSS reading capabilities were integrated into other products like e-mail applications and browsers. And, indeed, a number of consumer-oriented RSS readers, including News Alloy, Rojo, and News Gator, shut down in recent years.
The reason is that users are turning to social services like Facebook and Twitter to keep up with what’s hot, important, newsy, and relevant.
An autumn forest. Death or respite before rebirth?
I don’t dispute that for many folks the RSS boom has had its sound dissipate. However, there are several factors operating that help me understand why the RSS reader has lost its appeal for most Web users. Our work suggest these factors are operating:
- RSS set up and management cause the same problems that the original Pointcast, Backweb, and Desktop Data created. There is too much for the average user to do and then too much on going maintenance required to keep the services useful.
- The RSS stream outputs a lot of baloney along with the occasional chunk of sirloin. We have coded our own system to manage information on the topics that interest the goose. Most folks don’t want this type of control. After some experience with RSS, my hunch is that many users find them too much work and just abandon them. End users and consumers are not too keen on doing repetitive work that keeps them from kicking back and playing Farmville or keeping track of their friends.
- The volume of information in itself is one part of the problem. The high value content moves around, so plugging into a blog today is guarantee that the content source will be consistent, on topic, or rich with information tomorrow. We have learned that lack of follow through by the creators of content creators is an issue. Publishers know how to make content. Dabblers don’t. The problem is that publishers can’t generate big money so their enthusiasm seems to come and go. Individuals are just individuals and a sick child can cause a blog writer to find better uses for any available time.
SAP: From Sybase to Semantics
September 11, 2010
SAP is certainly trying to convince me that the little chip off the Big Blue block has what it takes in today’s economic thunderstorm. I am interested in SAP because the company’s approach represents a model that seems to be increasingly difficult to use to make me happy. The azurini love SAP, but a goose like me? Not so much.
Now with increasing research role in the semantic web space, we find SAP surprisingly becoming a ‘gorilla’ in this realm. The Semantic Web.com article “Semantic Web Meets BI In New Project Whose Partners Include SAP, Sheffield Hallam University, Ontotext” informs about SAPs yet another venture as a R&D and managing partner of a collaborative project. It is the Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) semantic web-BI space project, initiated “to create new visual tools to help businesses make sense of tons of data.” For more about Ontotext, visit the firm’s Web site at www.ontotext.com.
As per the article, “The goal of the project is ambitious: it will develop the first framework for enriching Business Intelligence with Semantic Web technologies,” which it intends to achieve by “developing a semantic incorporated business platform dealing with large amount of data and offering interactive visualization.” SAP, which provides the bulk of the project management, has earlier been a part of the Monnet Project involved in cross-lingual business intelligence using semantic technology.
Will this semantic push be the magic for SAP and Sybase? The goose is skeptical. And whatever happened to TREX and the SAP stake in Endeca. Are not these systems equipped with some semantic sweetness?
Harleena Singh, September 11, 2010
Freebie
Leadspace Prepping for a Take Off?
August 30, 2010
One of my readers in Israel forwarded to me an update on Leadspace Ltd., founded by Amnon Mishor and Yaron Karasik. Originally named Data Essence, Leadspace is rumored to have applied its proprietary semantic technology to the tough problem of finding information. From what I can gather, the system taps features of existing linked data, natural language processing, social cues, and user actions to go “beyond search.”
A semantic graph which may be one aspect of the Leadspace approach.
With search and content processing companies scrambling to distance themselves from the somewhat devalued sector of information retrieval, Leadspace has been hiring some people. In addition, there is some casual talk that the company has technology that generates reports instead of results lists. ClearForest, now part of the Thomson Reuters’ operation, was an early semantic technology success. Will this Technion Entrepreneurial Incubator Company (TEIC) follow in ClearForest’s footsteps? According to the information in my Overflight system, the company landed some early stage money and received another $3.0 million in March 2010. A quick look at the archived copies of its original data-essence.com Web pages, the company listed articles on semantic technologies, but there is not too much detail available. A comment on StartUpMania.net struck me as interesting but at this time unsubstantiated about the firm’s technology. Globes reported in March 2010 that Leadspace funding comes from Vertext Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners. With the interest in semantic technology rising, Leadspace may be readying itself for a marketing push.
Stephen E Arnold, August 30, 2010
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Another Future of Search Prognostication
August 22, 2010
I am having a tough time keeping track of the “future of search” prognostications. For years, no one seemed to think much about search. In fact, until I pointed out in 2003 or so that search sucked, did not work, generally annoyed most of those using the systems, and was becoming a commodity—people were indifferent. Google worked. End of story. Commercial search systems were used by one or two percent of online users and the other 98 percent had zero knowledge of industrial-strength information retrieval.
Today, everyone’s an expert.
Navigate to “The Future of Internet Search” by Zurich-born Esther Dyson. Her interests range from investing to health care, private aviation, and space travel. I am happy to catch a flight to Detroit that sort of works. Space travel is a bit of a reach for the goose.
The write up presents a view of the future of search. For me, the main idea is that search has bumbled along. There’s an obligatory nod to Yahoo and some highlights for Google and Bing. The key passage, in my opinion, is:
Medstory has a deep understanding of health care, including the relationships between diseases and treatments, drugs and symptoms, and side effects. Powerset, a tool for creating and defining such relationships in any sphere of interest, is broader but less deep. This all happened a couple of years ago – just before Yahoo! gave up on search entirely and handed that part of its business over to Microsoft. Also around that time, Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: “The future of search is verbs.” But he said it at a private dinner and it never spread.
Three observations:
- Okay, search is verbs. Are these the nifty “own,” “buy”, “invest,” “crush” and “kill” variety or the fuzzier “seem” “may”, “could-would-should” species. And what does “is” mean? I am still trying to figure that out.
- The semantic understanding “thing” in information retrieval is gaining momentum. Software, by golly, is going to figure out what a user really means and what he really wants.
- The methods for figuring out intent are moving from the specialist conferences to the pow wows among investors and other movers and shakers. I think this is okay, but I am not sure that this type of “push” is going to have the payout that some anticipate.
- The write up underscores that key word search is “yesterday”. Got it.
So the future of search is not the search that I use when conducting my research. No problem. I prefer to formulate queries, filter results, process information, and produce what I think are my value adds the old fashioned way. I don’t need nor do I want training wheels, black boxes, or a kindergarten teacher approach, thank you.
Stephen E Arnold, August 22, 2010
Freebie. Predict that.
OpenText: Imitation, Integration or Innovation? Pick Two
August 20, 2010
It’s nothing new to hear about a software company putting its once-hot acquisitions out to pasture, but a possible recent move by enterprise search big dog Open Text has us wondering. The root of this change comes from a recent announcement about the company’s exciting search advances. Detailed in a Red Orbit story, “Open Text Launches Semantic Navigation,” this new program is unquestionably an innovative addition to the search world. Where most search engines just look for words that match a searcher’s input, Semantic Navigation aims to read between the lines in a way that, to our knowledge, hasn’t been done before. Think Endeca and 1998 or so.
“Open Text Semantic Navigation offers a way to improve the user experience,” the article explains. “At the core of the offering is the Open Text Content Analytics engine that intelligently extracts meaning, sentiment and context from content, and in turn marries that content to what a customer or prospect is looking for on a Web site. The result is that audiences more consistently and quickly find helpful, valuable information with much less effort.”
With its implementation, Open Text seems to have put all the necessary pieces together for a success. According to the article, this deeper search option, “is designed to complement any existing Web site, independent of the Web content management system used, either installed on local servers or as an online service provided by Open Text. With the cloud-based offering (currently in beta), organizations can rapidly and inexpensively upgrade their sites’ user experience.”
This sounds like a great option for improving search and, if it catches on, we have no doubt other search programs will follow suit. Some search services we are wondering about, however, include BASIS, BRS, Fulcrum, and SGML. These are four of Open Text’s search systems and all were omitted from the article. This leads us to believe that these four may not benefit from the wonders of Semantic Navigation simultaneously. These services may need some Xzibit-style dressing up in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, August 20 ,2010
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Update on Facebook Questions
August 18, 2010
It’s no secret that Google has been aiming to take a bite out of the social media world with programs like Buzz. However, social media kingpin Facebook is fighting back and possibly taking a bite out of Google’s search dominance. Digital Journal outlined this tactic in a recent article, “Facebook Launches Questions Feature.” The gist of the article is that Facebook will soon allow users to ask questions to the community and get answers. Anything from recipes, to historic facts and personal data are up for grabs. According to the piece, “Facebook Questions goes up against some strong players in the ask-a-question-get-an-answer field.” Namely, the king of answer providing: Google. This is going to be a fun war to watch, because Google is not used to losing and Facebook provides a unique spin on Q&A options that its competition can’t touch. Google seems to be a giant looking like the gorilla on top of the Empire State Building.
Pat Roland, August 18, 2010
Semantic Enterprise: The StartUps
August 17, 2010
The enterprise software market is full of possibilities and there are many opportunities available for new semantic enterprise start ups. In “Semantic Enterprise: The StartUps” readers are provided with a list of semantic enterprise start ups. The company, Ontoprise oversees a number of products. Ontoprise has an impressive client base but with so many different products it can become difficult to keep up with emerging changes which can negatively impact their longevity in the market. Revelytix is another start up but it has the potential to thrive as a semantic enterprise vendor because its emergent analytics is gaining momentum and interest. The start up Franz has gained its reputation on the sale of development tools and database management products. There is a big market for development tools and database management and if Franz can continuously evolve with technology they could be a lasting vendor. There is a huge profit at stake and each start up vendor has to build a thriving business in order to get a piece of the pie.
April Holmes, August 17, 2010
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