After Key Word Search: Social Analytics and Change
May 13, 2011
There’s an outfit called TechChange. Its tag line, the Institute for technology and social change, has little to do with search and content processing. However, the article “SwiftRiver: Where Software Meets Social Change” highlights issues not discussed at search vendor conferences, in the wild and crazy “emotion analytics” world, or at search centric conferences. No big surprise. Most conferences are “pay to play” events. The few “objective” presentations are often little more than day old bread sliced and slathered with oleo.
This article is interesting because it uses a single vendor (SwiftRiver) as the hook for applying a content framework that adds value to information. This sure sounds like search and content processing to me. The difference is the context. Here’s the description of the SwiftRiver system:
Our core platform has several points of easy extension and one of these is the plug-in system we call Parsers. Each parser knows how to communicate with one type of source and how to process data coming from that source. Examples of existing parsers are; the ‘Twitter Search Parser’, the ‘Frontline SMS Parser’ and the ‘Google News Parser’. The Parser plug-in architecture is very simple to program for, meaning that new Parsers for any new source are simple to produce and then leverage. It would therefore, be a relatively simple task for a developer to create a Parser that ‘understood’ how to use discreet data such as geo-coordinates (or in fact any other type of data) and knew how you receive that data from a source such as an SMS Gateway. Once written, the Parser can literally be dropped into the correct folder of the software install and this new Channel (combination of source and data type) would instantly become available for use.
The interesting spin put on the SwiftRiver technology is that a licensee can develop applications that:
can help private sector entities invest in developing counties in a way that is both profitable and socially responsible.
I find this approach fascinating. Too many content processing vendors chase down the trampled path of customer support, sentiment analysis, metatagging, and mashing up stuff. SwiftRiver has hooked next generation content processing into making a social difference. The original perception I had of SwiftRiver was processing large amounts of information quickly. the firm offers semantic analysis, auto categorization, and information classification. Instead of pitching access to documents in a content management system, SwiftRiver is flowing in a different direction.
You can get more information about SwiftRiver at http://swiftly.org in (as I write this) in 11 days, 3 hours and 22 minutes. Mysterious, no?
Stephen E Arnold, May 13, 2011
Freebie
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
