SEO Semantics and the Vibrant Vivid Vees
January 29, 2021
Years ago, one of the executives at Vivisimo, which was acquired by IBM, told me about the three Vees. These were the Vees of Vivisimo’s metasearch system. The individual, who shall remain nameless, whispered: Volume, Velocity, and Variety. He smiled enigmatically. In a short time, the three Vees were popping up in the context of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and content discovery.
The three Vivisimo Vees seem to capture the magic and mystery of digital data flows. I am not on that wheezing bus in Havana.
Volume is indeed a characteristic of online information. Even if one has a trickle of Word documents to review each day, the individual reading, editing, and commenting on a report has a sense that there are more Word documents flying around than the handful in this morning’s email. But in the context of our datasphere, no one knows how much digital data exist, what it contains, who has access, etc. Volume is a fundamental characteristic of today’s datasphere. The only way to contain data is to pull the plug. That is not going to happen unless there is something larger than Google. Maybe a massive cyber attack?
The second Vee is variety. From the point of view of the Vivisimo person, variety referred to the content that text centric system processed. Text, unlike a tidy database file, is usually a mess. Without structure, transform and load outfits have been working for decades to convert the messy into the orderly or at least pull out certain chunks so that one can extract key words, dates, and may entities with reasonable accuracy. Today there is a lot of variety; however, for every new variant old ones become irrelevant. At best, the variety challenge is like a person in a raft trying to paddle to keep from being swamped with intentional and unintentional content types. How about those encrypted message? Another hurdle for the indexing outfit: Decryption, metadata extraction and assignment, and processing throughput. So the variety Vee is handled by focusing on a subset of content. Too bad for those who think that “all” information is online.
The third Vee is a fave among the real time crowd. The idea that streams and flows of data in real time can be processed on the fly, patterns identified, advanced analytics applied, and high value data emitted. This notion is a good one when working in print shop in the 17th century. Those workflows don’t make any sense when figuring out the stream of data produced by an unidentified drone which may be weaponized. Furthermore, if a monitoring device notes a several millisecond pattern before a person’s heart attack, that’s not too helpful when the afflicted individual falls over dead a second later. What is “real time”? Answer: There are many types, so the fix is to focus, narrow, winnow, and go for a high probability signal. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.
The three Vees are a clever and memorable marketing play. A company can explain how its system manages each of these issues for a particular customer use case. The one size fit all idea is not what generates information processing revenues. Service fees, subscriptions, and customization are the money spinners.
The write up “The Four V’s of Semantic Search” adds another Vee to the Vivisimo three: Veracity. I don’t want to argue “truth” because in the datasphere for every factoid on one side of an argument, even a Bing search can generate counter examples. What’s interesting is that this veracity Vee is presented as part of search engine optimization using semantic techniques. Here’s a segment I circled:
The fourth V is about how accurate the information is that you share, which speaks about your expertise in the given subject and to your honesty. Google cares about whether the information you share is true or not and real or not, because this is what Googles [sic] audience cares about. That’s why you won’t usually get search results that point to the fake news sites.
Got that. Marketing hoo hah, sloganeering, and word candy — just like the three Vivisimo Vees.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2021
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