Archive for February, 2009

The Intentional Web

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

The majority of the time one browses or searches the web there is a goal in mind. Find the location of a coffee shop, learn more about cloud computing, see if there are any interesting new movies, be distracted and procrastinate. Each of these instances of web use has objectives and implicitly defines a success predicate. When one (the agent) interacts with the web, a computer or simply information (the system), that systems knowledge or discovery of an explicit representation of the agent’s objectives, and the success predicates for these objectives, greatly enhances its capability to assist the agent in accomplishing its objectives.
The intentional web is a community of agents interacting with each other to accomplish their goals and increase their fitness.

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Asynchronous Microlearning and Microfranchising

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

At Helioid, we will leverage the opportunity and advantages gleaned from our search solutions to support netroots humanitarianism, in addition to our primary goal of meeting the emerging need for a new sort of web search and academic/enterprise research. Information scientists like Chaomei Chen have demonstrated that representations of published research in a given field – clustered by citation analysis – can so accurately characterize the field that changes in the representation can be used to predict the emergence of new research paradigms, and so these clustered representations can be used to help guide research. Others like Peter Pirolli argue that, since such representations illustrate areas in which relatively sparse research efforts have been undertaken, they can be used to optimally distribute the efforts of researchers over presently hot subject areas, and under-explored regions of the field. Moreover, there is a very clear opportunity presented by such structured knowledge representations for enabling any interested party to make some manner of contribution to such innovative networks, as such navigable representations allow users to assemble crash courses in a broad subject area, or pick and choose over specific topics in which their acumen might be lacking.

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Kosmix and the Semantic Web

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

I just recently ran across an interview with Anand Rajaraman, founder of Kosmix, and something that was said toward the end of the interview piqued my interest. The subject of the Semantic Web came up, the existence of which Anand claimed would far more likely be brought about by apps “mining intelligence” out of the internet’s squall of information, rather than the universal adoption of a common semantic ontology like RFL. We certainly agree with that, as we believe that the winners of the race to establish the next generation of web search will be the ones who mine intelligence the most efficiently. However, something stuck in my craw about Kosmix being held up as an example of the various expeditions presently being made in this general direction. Which isn’t to say that I think Kosmix is not on such an expedition, but rather that I seem to be feeling the same vague perturbation I felt when I first made an expedition of my own through the flurry of noise on Kosmix, after hearing about the explorative experience supported by their search engine.

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