American Sign Language Emojis: Will Search Vendors Adapt?
August 7, 2015
Short honk: Forget words in English. “There’s Finally a Good Way to Text in Sign Language” explains that a new mobile keyboard app allows American Sign Language speakers to send text messages to a hearing impaired individual. The write up states:
Signily also includes animated signs for many popular ASL phrases that don’t have exact English translations. This makes texting a more natural experience for signers.
How does one parse and search these messages? Think look up table maybe? Will semantic vendors be able to make sense of animated signs?
Sure, semantic search is just super. And the meeting to discuss this?
Stephen E Arnold, August 7, 2015
IT Architecture Needs to Be More Seamless
August 7, 2015
IT architecture might appear to be the same across the board, but depending on the industry the standards change. Rupert Brown wrote “From BCBS To TOGAF: The Need For A Semantically Rigorous Business Architecture” for Bob’s Guide and he discusses how TOGAF is the defacto standard for global enterprise architecture. He explains that while TOGAF does have its strengths, it supports many weaknesses are its reliance on diagrams and using PowerPoint to make them.
Brown spends a large portion of the article stressing that information content and model are more important and a diagramed should only be rendered later. He goes on that as industries have advanced the tools have become more complex and it is very important for there to be a more universal approach IT architecture.
What is Brown’s supposed solution? Semantics!
“The mechanism used to join the dots is Semantics: all the documents that are the key artifacts that capture how a business operates and evolves are nowadays stored by default in Microsoft or Open Office equivalents as XML and can have semantic linkages embedded within them. The result is that no business document can be considered an island any more – everything must have a reason to exist.”
The reason that TOGAF has not been standardized using semantics is the lack of something to connect various architecture models together. A standardized XBRL language for financial and regulatory reporting would help get the process started, but the biggest problem will be people who make a decent living using PowerPoint (so he claims).
Brown calls for a global reporting standard for all industries, but that is a pie in the sky hope unless the government imposes regulations or all industries have a meeting of the minds. Why? The different industries do not always mesh, think engineering firms vs. a publishing house, and each has their own list of needs and concerns. Why not focus on getting industry standards for one industry rather than across the board?
Whitney Grace, August 7, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Alleged Semantic Tips Spot on for Freshman Comp Students
August 5, 2015
I find the amount of attention given to semantic search as it applies to search engine optimization a fascinating development. “Semantic”, like Big Data, is fast becoming meaningless. The root of semantic is the Greek word for significant.
The application of the word semantic to information search and retrieval is a bit less straightforward. Toss in the concept of “search” and “content processing” and the output is an an information smoothie with big chunks of tough to identify systems and methods; for example:
- Methods to discern user intent
- Methods to figure out the context of an ambiguous element
- Programmatic data inserted into a content object which makes sense to a content processing system set up to recognize these instructions
- Systems which use pre-compiled look up tables or programmatic methods to figure out which words go together (White House or white house) or which alias goes with which person of interest
- Systems which attempt to “make sense” of content objects which signify some other information such as “Harrod’s teddy bear” as a token for an illegal substance
- Systems which deal with multi lingual corpuses
- Malformed Web accessible content which is supposed to comply with the W3C standards for semantic “stuff”.
You get the idea. Semantic drags in a number of interesting systems and methods. Many of these are complex and evolving as innovators try to deal with lousy precision and recall which is the norm for many “semantic” methods.
Now navigate to “Semantic Search Strategies That Work.” I would suggest that the tips in this write up apply to a person in an introductory college writing class. Here they are:
- “Forget about content as a daily grind.” Now that is music to a freshman’s ears. The silly notion that many professional writers have is that writing is something one must do every day and pursue with discipline. Nah, for real semantic search, take it easy. Chillax.
- “Concentrate on quality.” Now this is an interesting point. Google calculates quality based on a number of factors. The idea that a person who writes a high quality post and benefit from that effort is intriguing. In my experience, many excellent write ups get absolutely zero attention. These are usually write ups that address topics far from the pop music, Netflix, and Donald Trump scene. Here’s an example: Alon Halevy, et al, “Biperpedia: An Ontology for Search Applications.” This is a high quality paper, and I doubt that SEO mavens can match the effort which went into this 12 page write up. The write up deals with semantic issues, by the way.
- “When you write show who you are.” Not so fast. With the data lapses at various government agencies, health insurers, and corporate entities, content generated for the Web may require some thought, grooming, and vetting. How many SEO wizards want me to know about their behaviors and thoughts beyond their asserted expertise in fooling Google to rank an irrelevant site high in a query results list? How many SEO experts want the world to know that Google dropped a site in its rankings due to SEO missteps? What SEO expert wants a system to know what the person did prior to becoming an SEO expert? What about those secret actions like hunting lions in Africa or a dust up at a local watering hole? Think about this “who you are” stuff. Think carefully.
- “Focus on your prospects.” Ah, the bias is explicit. The motivating factor is that one writes to sell consulting work. Wrong. My hunch is that Dr. Halevy writes because he is curious and has colleagues with whom to collaborate in order to advance a particular area of inquiry. Halevy already sold a company to Google and, I assume, could sit at home and do volunteer SEO work. So far, he has resisted the siren song of easy money via baloney expertise.
- “Spend time on engagement.” I think this means attend conferences, post to social media, and hang out at watering holes without being captured in an on looker’s mobile phone picture.
Snake oil is available, gentle reader. Use with caution because it can damaged certain cognitive functions while emptying one’s bank account.
Stephen E Arnold, August 5, 2015
My Refrigerator Door Shuts Automatically or Content Processing Vendor Works Hard at Repositioning
August 3, 2015
This weekend I checked out the flow of news from several dozen search and content processing vendors. What I discovered was surprising. For example, for the set of 36 vendors, there was zero substantive news about the companies’ information access technology. More disturbing were the hints of revenue difficulties; for example, New Zealand based SLI Systems, a public traded company, continues to lose money. Search and content processing sales challenges are forcing vendors to reposition themselves or align themselves with business trends which are more likely to have traction with senior managers.
How does a semantic technology company adapt. The approach is surprising, and it involves the Internet of Things. This is the push to put a Nest in your home and an Internet node in your appliances. One benefit is energy efficiency. The other idea is increased opportunities to push advertising to the hapless consumer who just wants to nuke a burrito in a microwave (smart of dumb microwave may not matter to a hungry teen).
I am not sure about your refrigerator. My double door General Electric refrigerator (what my grandmother called an “ice box” and some folks call a “fridge”) has doors which shut automatically. The refrigerator has an odd energy efficient sticker like the ones I remove from monitors which persist in going to sleep when my intelligence does not match the gizmo’s.
I understand that someday soon I will have a refrigerator with lots of intelligence. I am confident that with a few moments thought, I can kill that puppy’s brain.
In my narrow world, bounded by gun toting neighbors and dynamite crazed bridge builders, the Internet of Things or the somewhat odd acronym “IoT”, pronounced by my Spanish tutor “Eee ooooh tay”, will be a bit like Big Data, semantic search, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and data lakes. The idea is that a search and content processing vendor can surf on a hot idea like fraud and pump some air into the sagging balloon labeled sales leads.
I am more convinced of this verbal magic each time I read about “new” technology from companies that are essentially vendors of look up functions applicable to information access.
The IoT is, in my opinion, more about getting information about a machine’s performance, the leasee’s adherence to maintenance schedules, and alerts about highly probably device failure.
One of my neighbors has a Mercedes which beeps, vibrates, and flashes when my neighbor strays across the white lines on the highway. Annoying but semi useful. The Mercedes also can phone home if my neighbor’s big expensive SUV experiences a malfunction. Useful. Maybe annoying if the malfunction occurs when the SUV is parked in front of the local Neiman Marcus or Goodwill store.
I read “Content Analysis and the Internet of Things: Never Leave the Fridge Door Open Again?” The main point of the write up is the question which I already answered. My refrigerator automatically shuts its door.
The article states:
The Internet of Things is the expanding network of physical objects that collect information, communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment according to Gartner, which reports that there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020.
Ah, yes, the mid tier firm Gartner, an excellent source of objective, unbiased, inclusion free information.
Here’s the article’s keeper passage I noted from a senior manager at a content processing company. Keep that phrase in mind: “content processing.”
With the common method of interaction, we will speak, devices will read, the design will be predicated upon our needs and less so upon the device. The trend seems so simple—for us to understand these devices, the devices must understand us. The difference is meaning. Data is an abstraction, understanding is communication, and to understand and communicate one must know meaning.
I am delighted that data have meaning. I just wonder how much of a stretch it is to apply text centric methods to outputs from an industrial machine connected to the Internet via an iGear service. My hunch is, “Not too much.”
To me the phrase “content processing” means words, not data output from my neighbor’s flashy Mercedes or an Internet enabled refrigerator.
As I said, my refrigerator door closes automatically. Do I want anyone to know that let the hinges do the work?
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2015
Finnish Content Discovery Case Study
July 31, 2015
There are many services that offer companies the ability to increase their content discover. One of these services is Leiki, which offers intelligent user profiling, context-based intelligence, and semantic SaaS solutions. Rather than having humans adapt their content to get to the top of search engine results, the machine is altered to fit a human’s needs. Leiki pushes relevant content to a user’s search query. Leiki released a recent, “Case Study: Lieki Smart Services Increase Customer Flow Significantly At Alma Media.”
Alma Media is one of the largest media companies in Finland, owning many well-known Finnish brands. These include Finland’s most popular Web site, classified ads, and a tabloid newspaper. Alma Media employed two of Leiki’s services to grow its traffic:
“Leiki’s Smart Services are adept at understanding textual content across various content types: articles, video, images, classifieds, etc. Each content item is analyzed with our semantic engine Leiki Focus to create a very detailed “fingerprint” or content profile of topics associated with the content.
SmartContext is the market leading service for contextual content recommendations. It’s uniquely able to recommend content across content types and sites and does this by finding related content using the meaning of content – not keyword frequency.
SmartPersonal stands for behavioral content recommendations. As it also uses Leiki’s unique analysis of the meaning in content, it can recommend content from any other site and content type based on usage of one site.”
The case study runs down how Leiki’s services improved traffic and encouraged more users to consume its content. Leiki’s main selling point in the cast study is that offers users personal recommendations based on content they clicked on Alma Media Web sites. Leiki wants to be a part of developing Web 3.0 and the research shows that personalization is the way for it to go.
Whitney Grace, July 31, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Semantic Web and JSON LD: Some Irritation Perhaps?
July 30, 2015
I read the Wikipedia article about JSON LD or JavaScript Object notation for Linked Data when I was pondering the fate of the XML centric start ups like MarkLogic. I highlighted one sentence in the Wikipedia write up which is subject to the usual caveats about bias, incorrect information, etc. And that sentence was:
JSON-LD is designed around the concept of a “context” to provide additional mappings from JSON to an RDF model.
Yes, the much loved RDF model.
When I read “JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web,” I noticed a bit of friskiness in the word choice; for example, misguided souls, cryptic, complicated, market share, “kick RDF in the nuts,” and similar rhetorical arabesques. I do like the active verb “kick” however.
The passage I highlighted with my bright orange marker was this one:
The problem with getting a room full of smart people together is that the group’s world view gets skewed. There are many reasons that a working group filled with experts don’t consistently produce great results. For example, many of the participants can be humble about their knowledge so they tend to think that a good chunk of the people that will be using their technology will be just as enlightened. Bad feature ideas can be argued for months and rationalized because smart people, lacking any sort of compelling real world data, are great at debating and rationalizing bad decisions.
Seems normal to me.
In my opinion, this write up explains why some XML centric, Semantic Web cheerleaders have labored to generate organic growth. Just a thought. Talking to fellow travelers is reassuring and comfortable. Those not on the cruise ship may have a different point of view.
Stephen E Arnold, July 30, 2015
Italian Firm Delivers Semantic API to Wall Street
July 22, 2015
Short honk: There are quite a few high technology firms chasing the deep pockets on Wall Street and in the City. Some, like Digital Reasoning, have teamed with larger players to capture customers. Others, like Connotate, have relied on their stakeholders to open doors. Many companies attended financial technology showcases to demonstrate the power of their intelligent systems; for example, Digital Shadows. Some companies like Terbium Labs show up and demonstrate how their advanced technology reduces risk and improves financial performance.
Expert System is approaching the market with what it calls the “first semantic API”. The idea is that money folks can create cognitive computing systems. You can read about the system at this link.
Expert Systems is betting that this is true. The news release quotes Luca Scagliarini, CEO as saying:
Intelligent solutions for strategic information management are absolutely critical in today’s big data world, and no where is this more critical than in the financial services industry where inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to fatal decisions. With Cogito API Finance, we are filling a big gap and tremendous need for customized knowledge management solutions in the financial industry.
Expert System is a publicly traded company (EXSY:MI) so the payoff from this cognitive push should be evident in the firm’s next financial report.
Today shares are trading at 2.12, up 0.02 or 0.76 percent. BAE Systems, a company with its NetReveal / Detica technologies which are in use in a number of financial applications, is trading at 29.35. There is market headroom available.
Stephen E Arnold, July 22, 2015
On Embedding Valuable Outside Links
July 21, 2015
If media websites take this suggestion from an article at Monday Note, titled “How Linking to Knowledge Could Boost News Media,” there will be no need to search; we’ll just follow the yellow brick links. Writer Frederic Filloux laments the current state of affairs, wherein websites mostly link to internal content, and describes how embedded links could be much, much more valuable. He describes:
“Now picture this: A hypothetical big-issue story about GE’s strategic climate change thinking, published in the Wall Street Journal, the FT, or in The Atlantic, suddenly opens to a vast web of knowledge. The text (along with graphics, videos, etc.) provided by the news media staff, is amplified by access to three books on global warming, two Ted Talks, several databases containing references to places and people mentioned in the story, an academic paper from Knowledge@Wharton, a MOOC from Coursera, a survey from a Scandinavian research institute, a National Geographic documentary, etc. Since (supposedly), all of the above is semanticized and speaks the same lingua franca as the original journalistic content, the process is largely automatized.”
Filloux posits that such a trend would be valuable not only for today’s Web surfers, but also for future historians and researchers. He cites recent work by a couple of French scholars, Fabian Suchanek and Nicoleta Preda, who have been looking into what they call “Semantic Culturonomics,” defined as “a paradigm that uses semantic knowledge bases in order to give meaning to textual corpora such as news and social media.” Web media that keeps this paradigm in mind will wildly surpass newspapers in the role of contemporary historical documentation, because good outside links will greatly enrich the content.
Before this vision becomes reality, though, media websites must be convinced that linking to valuable content outside their site is worth the risk that users will wander away. The write-up insists that a reputation for providing valuable outside links will more than make up for any amount of such drifting visitors. We’ll see whether media sites agree.
Cynthia Murrell, July 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
On Embedding Valuable Outside Links
July 17, 2015
If media websites take this suggestion from an article at Monday Note, titled “How Linking to Knowledge Could Boost News Media,” there will be no need to search; we’ll just follow the yellow brick links. Writer Frederic Filloux laments the current state of affairs, wherein websites mostly link to internal content, and describes how embedded links could be much, much more valuable. He describes:
“Now picture this: A hypothetical big-issue story about GE’s strategic climate change thinking, published in the Wall Street Journal, the FT, or in The Atlantic, suddenly opens to a vast web of knowledge. The text (along with graphics, videos, etc.) provided by the news media staff, is amplified by access to three books on global warming, two Ted Talks, several databases containing references to places and people mentioned in the story, an academic paper from Knowledge@Wharton, a MOOC from Coursera, a survey from a Scandinavian research institute, a National Geographic documentary, etc. Since (supposedly), all of the above is semanticized and speaks the same lingua franca as the original journalistic content, the process is largely automatized.”
Filloux posits that such a trend would be valuable not only for today’s Web surfers, but also for future historians and researchers. He cites recent work by a couple of French scholars, Fabian Suchanek and Nicoleta Preda, who have been looking into what they call “Semantic Culturonomics,” defined as “a paradigm that uses semantic knowledge bases in order to give meaning to textual corpora such as news and social media.” Web media that keeps this paradigm in mind will wildly surpass newspapers in the role of contemporary historical documentation, because good outside links will greatly enrich the content.
Before this vision becomes reality, though, media websites must be convinced that linking to valuable content outside their site is worth the risk that users will wander away. The write-up insists that a reputation for providing valuable outside links will more than make up for any amount of such drifting visitors. We’ll see whether media sites agree.
Cynthia Murrell, July 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Want To Know What A Semantic Ecosystem Is
July 8, 2015
Do you want to know what a semantic ecosystem is? The answer is available from TopQuadrant in its article, “Semantic Ecosystem-What’s That About?” According to the article, a semantic ecosystem enables patterns to be discovered, show the relationships between and within data sources, add meaning to raw data artifacts, and dynamically bring information together.
In short, it shows how data and its sources connect with each other and extracts relationships from it.
What follows the brief explanation about what a semantic ecosystem can do is a paragraph about the importance of data, how it takes many forms, etc., etc. Trust me, you have heard it before. It then makes a comparison with a natural ecosystem, i.e. the ones find in nature.
The article continues with this piece:
“As in natural ecosystems, we believe that success in business is based on capability – and the ability to adapt and evolve new capabilities. Semantic ecosystems transform existing diverse information into valuable semantic assets. Key characteristics of a semantic ecosystem are that it is adaptable and evolvable. You can start small – with one or more key business solutions and a few data sources – and the semantic foundation can grow and evolve with you.”
It turns out a semantic ecosystem is just another name for information management. TopQuadrant coined the term to associate with their products and services. Talk about fancy business jargon, but TopQuadrant makes a point about having an information system work so well that it seems natural. When a system works naturally, it is able to intuit needs, interpret patterns, and make educated correlations between data.
Whitney Grace, July 8, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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