SYL Semantics Resurfaces with News of Patent Bill
January 2, 2014
The article Patent Removal Regretted, But Search Firm Pushes On from ComputerWorld explores the consequences of the Patents Amendment Bill on SYL Enterprise Search in New Zealand. SYL distinguishes itself from most Enterprise Search companies by basing its work not on hype but on “access to relevant information.”
The article states:
“SYL’s platform is based on a dictionary of 580,000 English words, with records of associations among them, such as what words are synonyms and how the concepts they indicate are related; for example that Wellington is in New Zealand. Specialist dictionaries can be added to deal with particular business areas with their own vocabularies. Surveys indicate as much as 25 percent of an executive’s time can be consumed by searching for information”
Syl’s engine works to reduce time-wasting metadata creation by automatically generating plenty of metadata by making associations with words in the document. The clause in the New Zealand bill that a computer program does not qualify as a patentable invention would not effect the patent that SYL already holds on its techniques, but that has not stopped SYL CEO Sean Wilson from voicing his dissent. He suggests that the time and investment put into any invention would be wasted if it were impossible to patent and protect against imitation.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 02, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Release of 2nd Edition of the Elements of Statistical Learning
January 2, 2014
The release of the 2nd edition of The Elements of Statistical Learning is now available through the Stanford Statistics Department. The book was created in response to the massive leaps in computer and information technology in the last ten years by authors Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman. All are professors of statistics at Stanford, and the book does take a statistical approach but is concept-centered rather than focusing on mathematics.
The article summarizes the content:
“Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book’s coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting–the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book.”
Sounds like another goody for the artificial intelligence fan. The book is aimed at data analysts or theory junkies and is absent of code. In a review, D.J. Hand calls it “a beautiful book” in both presentation and content. His only criticism that if the book were to be used for an undergrad or grad level course it should be supplemented with more practical approach utilizing S-PLUS or R language, if that can be called a criticism when paired with his praise of the authors and their work.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google is Innovating While Other Companies Rest on Laurels
January 2, 2014
An article on SVBTLE Magazine by David Litwak titled Google is the new Bell Labs makes the startling and insightful announcement that Google is an unusual business. The Bell Labs the article refers to is the research sector of AT&T and Western Electric Research Laboratories, which takes credit for 7 Nobel Prizes and the invention of (to name a few items off the list) the laser, transistor and UNIX.
The article explains the connection between the two companies:
“Google is acting in the same spirit as Alexander Bell, using their incredibly lucrative money-maker (Google Adwords) to finance moonshots and ambitious side projects. Both GMail and Google Maps are great examples, and they are ahead of the game with a truly integrated travel search engine in Google Travel (2-3 years in my estimate), Google Glass/wearable computing (at least 5 years before its time), autonomous cars (maybe 10 years) and household/military robotics (15 years?).”
Comparing this with the work of Microsoft, Apple or Amazon seems almost unfair, or at least a faulty comparison. (Apples and oranges?) The article does credit Apple with the creation of the smartphone industry, but points out that since then they have not really branched out the way Google cannot seem to help doing. Google is in the business of innovation and industry making. Good thing someone is around to remind everyone.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP and Its New IDOL Categorizer
January 1, 2014
I read “Analytics for Human Information: Optimize Information Categorization with HP IDOL.” I noticed that HP did not reference the original reference to the 1998 categorization technology in its write up. From my point of view, news about something developed 15 years ago and referenced in subsequent Autonomy collateral is not something fresh to me. In fact, presenting the categorizer as something “amazing” suggests a superficial grasp of the history of IDOL technology which dates from the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is fascinating how some “experts” in content processing reinvent the wheel and display their intellectual process in such an amusing way. Is it possible to fool oneself and others? Remarkable.
Update, January 1, 2014, 11 am Eastern:
Hewlett Packard is publicizing IDOL’s automatic categorization capability. As a point of fact, this function has been available for 15 years. Here’s a description from a 2001 Autonomy IDOL Server Technical Brief, 2001.
DOL server can automatically categorize data with no requirement for manual input whatsoever. The flexibility of Autonomy’s Categorization feature allows you to precisely derive categories using concepts found within unstructured text. This ensures that all data is classified in the correct context with the utmost accuracy. Autonomy’s Categorization feature is a completely scalable solution capable of handling
high volumes of information with extreme accuracy and total consistency. Rather than relying on rigid rule based category definitions such as Legacy Keyword and Boolean Operators, Autonomy’s infrastructure relies on an elegant pattern matching process based on concepts to categorize documents and automatically insert tag data sets, route content or alert users to highly relevant information pertinent to the users profile. This highly efficient process means that Autonomy is able to categorize upwards of four million documents in 24 hours per CPU instance, that’s approximately one document, every 25 milliseconds. Autonomy hooks into virtually all repositories and data formats respecting all security and access entitlements, delivering complete reliability. IDOL server accepts a category or piece of content and returns categories ranked by conceptual similarity. This determines for which categories the piece of content is most appropriate, so that the piece of content can subsequently be tagged, routed or filed accordingly.
Stephen E Arnold, January 1, 2014
On Site SharePoint is Not Dead Yet
January 1, 2014
The move to the Cloud, away from on-site installations has been a rapid one, but not everybody is on board yet. Some organizations still have legitimate security concerns. Others just do not have the time or energy to make the move. So for people who need to rely on on-site SharePoint for a little while longer, there is good news. Read more in the SharePoint Pro article, “SharePoint SP1 and On-Premises vNext.”
The article says:
“In mid-November, Microsoft announced that Service Pack 1 for Office, Exchange, and SharePoint will be released in early 2014. The same day, SharePoint Senior Product Manager Bill Baer (@williambaer) announced in the SharePoint Team blog that the team will ‘continue to deliver… future on-premises versions of SharePoint on our traditional release cadence of 2-3 years.’ That simple announcement says, plain as day, something we’ve wanted Microsoft to say: On-prem SharePoint is not dead yet! There will be at least one more vNext of SharePoint.”
Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com covers the latest in SharePoint news. As a longtime leader in search he has seen many trends come and go. And while the Cloud is probably here to stay, it is no doubt a recent invention and one that still has a few drawbacks. Stay tuned for more SharePoint news as well as the latest in search.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 1, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Relational Data Stores Versus Hierarchical Databases
January 1, 2014
The article titled Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle on opensource connections relates the history of relational databases and applies their lessons to the NoSQL databases so popular today. The article walks through the simplest databases that followed the hierarchical model and then into generalized databases. The article then delves into the work of Edgar F. Codd himself:
“When Codd wrote his paper, he criticized the DBTG databases of the day around the area of how the application interacted with the databases abstractions. Low-level abstractions leaked into user applications. Application logic became dependent on aspects of the databases: Specifically, he cites three criticisms: access dependencies… order dependencies… index dependencies… Codd proposed to get around these limitations by focusing on a specific abstraction: relations…. In short, Codd created a beautiful abstraction that turned out to be reasonable to implement.”
Then came the decision to build horizontally scalable systems, which were incompatible with Codd’s abstraction. The article ultimately suggests that the smart way to approach a database is to base it off of your needs, not off of what is currently trending. There is even a Contact us link for readers who aren’t sure what type of database to select, hierarchical or relational.
Chelsea Kerwin, January 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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