Open Source and a New Look for Ontopia
January 22, 2014
If you are thinking about building applications based on topic maps and do not feel like shelling out money for proprietary software, then do not look any further than Ontopia! Ontopia is an open source tools suite with features such as an ontology designer, a full-featured query language; web services points, database storage, and an instance data editor. There are many more powerful tools available with Ontopia outlined here.
Ontopia has been an on-going project in the open source community for over a decade and has an interesting history:
“The product suite is highly mature. Ontopia 1.0 was released in June 2001, and we are now nearing the release of Ontopia 5.1. Ontopia has been in production use in a number of commercial projects on three continents for many years now, and the core engine has been very stable over most of that period. Ontopia is open source and released under the Apache License 2.0. The entire product is released as open source. There are no proprietary add-ons, which are necessary to run it, or to make it suitable for an enterprise setting. Commercial support, however, is available.”
A developer community that has been attached to the project for years keeps up Ontopia and there are new participants from Europe. If you are curious about recent activity with Ontopia, they keep a page with Google Code and they also recently updated the Web site’s design.
Whitney Grace, January 22, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Learn About the Open Source Alternative to ClearForest
January 22, 2014
Did you know that there was an open source version of ClearForest called Calais? Neither did we, until we read about it in the article posted on OpenCalais called, “Calais: Connect. Everything.” Along with a short instructional video, is a text explanation about how the software works. OpenCalais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata using natural language processing, machine learning, and other methods to analyze for submitted content. A list of tags are generated and returned to the user for review and then the user can paste them onto other documents.
The metadata can be used in a variety of ways for improvement:
“The metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to… whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about.”
The OpenCalais Web Service relies on a dedicated community to keep making progress and pushing the application forward. Calais takes the same approach as other open source projects, except this one is powered by Thomson Reuters.
Whitney Grace, January 22, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A New Knowledge Evangelist on the Pulpit
January 22, 2014
Market Wired reports on how “Coveo Names Diane Berry Chief Knowledge Evangelist” and how Berry’s new role will help organizations change their enterprise knowledge management practices to improve performance. Berry identifies knowledge management as an untapped tool that many organizations fail to harness, mostly left to IT departments to handle.
Berry says she will use her new position to leverage knowledge management:
” ‘My first blog as Chief Knowledge Evangelist will encourage the KM community at large to work together to evolve accepted definitions of Knowledge Management. Just as Knowledge Management within an organization should be a living, breathing practice that taps into the collective knowledge available to an organization — within and external to it — I’d like to tap into the collective knowledge of KM practitioners — including new thought leaders — to help organizations more strategically and effectively leverage the Long Tail of collective knowledge.’”
Berry’s new responsibilities include leading research programs, thought leadership, publications, and social evangelism. They all center around bringing knowledge management to the forefront of organization’s enterprise planning. Berry’s role echoes an approach Fulcrum Technologies, founded in the early 1980s in Ottawa, took. Enterprise search appears to be following the traditional pattern of Groundhog Day, see what we mean in Fulcrum’s profile.
Whitney Grace, January 22, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Training Now Focuses on 2013
January 22, 2014
Many companies make their success on the basis of SharePoint. Some may provide customization while others will offer training. Once such company is PremierPoint Solutions and they made the latest headlines on PRWeb in, “PremierPoint Solutions Reduces Training Prices, Unveils New ‘SharePoint 2013 Power User Fast Track’ Course.”
The article begins:
“PremierPoint Solutions has reduced the prices of its SharePoint training classes and unveiled a new three-day course called ‘SharePoint 2013 Power User Fast Track.’ ‘We are concentrating primarily on SharePoint 2013 training courses in the new year, as more and more organizations are deciding ‘out with the old; in with the new’ when it comes to SharePoint,’ said Randy Moody, sales and marketing representative for PremierPoint Solutions.”
The surge in SharePoint training and customization is proof that out-of-the-box, SharePoint alone is not enough. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and follows this trend on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. Much of his coverage focuses on what companies are doing to make the most of SharePoint through customization, add-ons, and increased training.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 22, 2014
Start Up Flops: No Search Vendor Examples
January 21, 2014
I read a quite interesting article, “51 Startup Failure Post-Mortems.” The links in the story point to source documents. The article presents a summary of the principal take away from a crash-and-burn experience.
The lessons are fascinating and include:
- Spreadsheet fever; that is, making assumptions about how many customers a start up will capture and how much each customer will pay
- Users don’t want what the company is selling
- Misallocating time; that is, buying stuff, not selling stuff
- Management errors; that is, hiring, spending, marketing.
I recommend this article. I want to point out that none of the examples came from the deep pool of search-and-content processing failures. Outfits involved in information retrieval face some hurdles that put some spin on the problems outlined in 51 Startup Failure Post-Mortems.
Let me highlight three:
First, search is assumed to be over with Google the winner. Furthermore, most individuals assume that their search skills are quite good, even excellent. As a result, a new information retrieval vendor has to find a way to capture the potential customers’ interest. Indifference combined with a perception that the potential customer has good enough tools produces unconscious resistance to a new search system. Search is ubiquitous and works reasonably well for finding a phone number, a pizza joint, or news about a celebrity.
Second, search and content processing has a cash appetite that has continued to surprise innovators, entrepreneurs, and acquirers. As digital information becomes more plentiful, more resources are required to process the information. Search is expensive and over time only gets more costly. Even the “winner” Google is taking steps to control its Web search costs. Money is a problem for search vendors from Day One and continues to be a problem for the lifetime of the search vendor. Exponential information growth requires exponential investment in resources.
Third, search does not work. Sure, on the surface, a quick look at Bing, Google, or Yandex provides results that answer most users’ questions. However, when one tries to dig into a subject, search in its present form is often unwieldy if not broken. For example, research a topic through time and one finds that content is no longer available. Commercial databases are fraught with gaps. Free services skip content due to latency problems or a desire to process certain low hanging fruit. In short, finding information today is getting more difficult by the day. Online content is not comprehensive, but users assume search systems have “everything.” Wrong.
These three characteristics contribute to the quiet and often noisy failures of search and content processing systems. Search is so disappointing that marketers find it easy to over promise and the systems then under deliver. Some of the lessons about actual companies that have failed in the search sector appear in the Xenky profiles.
Perhaps the next version of “51 Startup Failure Post-Mortems” will tap into the search and content processing sector.
Stephen E Arnold, January 21, 2014
A Wealth of Machine Learning Links
January 21, 2014
Anyone looking to learn more about (or brush up on) machine learning should check out this free resource we’ve discovered. The blog over at Conductrics supplies what amounts to a partial syllabus for self-study in “A List of Data Science and Machine Learning Resources.” The article shares links to websites that address each of several topics.
Writer Matt Gershoff introduces his resource roster:
“Every now and then I get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic. I tend to respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area. Over time my list has gotten a little larger so I decided to put it all together in a blog post. Since it is based mostly on the questions I have received, it is by no means complete, or even close to a complete list, but hopefully it will be of some use. Perhaps I will keep it updated, or even better yet, feel free to comment with anything you think might be of help.”
There is one caveat: Gershoff explains that, since machine learning is his thing, he hasn’t included anything on hardware or coding in this list. He recommends that, if your matrix (linear) algebra is rusty, you start with MIT’s undergraduate Linear Algebra class, available for free as video lectures by Professor Gilbert Strang. After that, it’s on to general machine learning with what Gershoff considers the most valuable link in his post—the machine learning page at VideoLectures.net.
The article goes on to suggest several more useful links. For example, one lecture contrasts Bayesian and Frequentist classifications, another source tackles deep learning, and yet another covers natural language processing. Check it out to boost your data science skills.
Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Programmer Has Problems with Microsoft
January 21, 2014
Has Microsoft lost the ability to quickly pivot with changes in the tech landscape? One programmer explains why it’s now the Java-community life for him in “Thank You Microsoft, and So Long…” at Byte Rot. The blogger known as Aliostad begins by tracing his relationship with assorted programming languages, then looks ahead to changes that are either on their way or already here.
As the article presents them, a couple of these predictions do indeed look bad for Microsoft. For example, the write-up anticipates a tech industry centered around big data solutions, on which Microsoft has not exactly been leading the way. It also asserts that, since horizontal scaling is becoming paramount, middleware like BizTalk and even enterprise databases themselves are on the way out. Check out the article’s reasoning and see whether you agree (at least one of the commenters did not.)
Whatever your opinion of Microsoft’s future, Aliostad has made his game plan for a field in flux.
He shares:
“I will carry on writing C#, ASP.NET Web API and read or write from SQL Server and do my best to write the best code I can. But I will start working on my Unix skills (by using it at home) and pick up one or two JVM languages (Clojure, Scala) and work on Hadoop. I will take Big Data more seriously. I mean real seriously… I need to stay close to where innovation is happening which sadly is not Microsoft now. From the Big Data to Google Glass and cars, it is all happening in the Java communities – and when I mean Java communities I do not mean the language but the ecosystem that is around it. And I will be ready to jump ships if I have to. And still wish Microsoft wakes up to the sound of its shrinking, not only in the PC market but also in its bread and butter, enterprise.”
Is this piece correct, is Microsoft really becoming obsolete? Somehow, I think the behemoth has the resources to adapt, even if it is a little late to the revised game. Spare no tears for Microsoft.
Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elasticsearchs Facebook Happiness and Search Competition in 2014
January 21, 2014
A holiday leftover we’ve found at the Elasticsearch Blog has us contemplating the open-source search race for 2014. The site shares video from a recent event in which a Facebook representative discusses his company’s use of their product in, “Facebook & Elasticsearch: for Your Holiday Viewing Pleasure.” Is Elasticsearch surpassing Silicon Valley-based LucidWorks?
The post introduces the video:
“So, without further ado, we bring you this video from the inaugural Elasticsearch Silicon Valley meetup, in which you’ll learn more about Facebook’s use of Elasticsearch, including:
- Facebook’s migration from Apache Solr to Elasticsearch
- The company’s use of Elasticsearch to power internal search for developer tool sets and libraries
- How Elasticsearch powers Facebook’s Community Help Site
- And much, much more on their use case.”
The video is over an hour long, and full of good technical information, if that’s your thing. But the first two minutes summarize why Facebook prefers Elasticsearch over the competition. (The company had previously tried using Google Enterprise Search and Apache Solr and found each lacking.) Below the video, the post links to a webinar on getting started with their product. Formed in 2012, Elasticsearch is based in Amsterdam with offices in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Switzerland. They are also hiring as of this writing; that’s usually a good sign.
We heard that OpenSearchServer, another open-source search vendor, snagged the Le Monde account from Sinequa. If true, there seems to be competition between open-source search vendors and non-open-source search systems as well as among open-source search vendors.
Contention and competition. The year 2014 will be fascinating.
Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint 2013 Podcast
January 21, 2014
SharePoint 2013 offered a lot of out-of-the-box features that were considered freebies to many that were expecting a traditional enterprise content management system. Scott Robinson is a SharePoint expert that offers a rundown via podcast. Read more in the Search Content Management article, “SharePoint 2013 Out-of-the-Box Features.”
The article says:
“According to business intelligence and SharePoint expert Scott Robinson, there are several SharePoint 2013 out-of-the-box features that “seem like freebies if that isn’t what you bought SharePoint for.” Robinson takes us through some of what he considers the biggest gifts of the SharePoint 2013 platform, and a couple of Microsoft’s missteps in the latest release.”
SharePoint’s incorporation of business intelligence and social computing features, as well as SharePoint Online are show stealers for Robinson. Stephen E. Arnold is also an expert in the area, and the brains behind ArnoldIT.com. He covers SharePoint through his search news service and offers an objective voice when it comes to enterprise adoption and customization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 21, 2014
Yale Online Course Catalog Update
January 20, 2014
I read “Yale Censored a Student’s Course Selection Website. So I Made an Unblockable Replacement.” The author seems to be a Yale student. Excitement will definitely ensue. Also, I am encouraged that the workaround is a Google Chrome extension. Good news for students who want to use a popular browser to respond to administrative actions. Perhaps a Googler will help out in the spring?
Here’s the passage I noted:
Banned Bluebook never stores data on any servers. It [the code] never talks to any non-Yale servers. Moreover, since my software is smarter at caching data locally than the official Yale course website, I expect that students using this extension will consume less bandwidth over time than students without it. Don’t believe me? You can read the source code. No data ever leaves Yale’s control. Trademarks, copyright infringement, and data security are non-issues. It’s 100% kosher.
Yep, kosher.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2014
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
