Group items tagged

The "Social Semantic Web" is here - yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

Thomas K Landauer, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Peter W. Foltz, Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University Darrell Laham, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The underlying idea is that the aggregate of all the word contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and sets of words to each other. The adequacy of LSA's reflection of human knowledge has been established in a variety of ways. For example, its scores overlap those of humans on standard vocabulary and subject matter tests; it mimics human word sorting and category judgments; it simulates word<>word and passage<>word lexical priming data; and, as reported in 3 following articles in this issue, it accurately estimates passage coherence, learnability of passages by individual students, and the quality and quantity of knowledge contained in an essay.

September 23, 2008 Research, done by MarketCap in cooperation with Aduna, shows that more than 60 percent of companies with over 200 employees, intend to invest in a project that uses semantic technology (Web 3.0) within a year's time. Almost 10 percent already uses semantic technology, or has already defined a semantic technology project. The fact that 60 percent of the companies plan to invest indicates an enormous increase of the use of semantic technology in the coming 12 months. Companies abound in information, but only a tiny amount is used by managers, either because most of the information is not visible or connections are not, or cannot be made. This is the situation mid-2008, but with the rise of semantic technologies this will change drastically in the coming years. More and more information will come to light and it will become easier to judge its usefulness.

At the ACM Hypertext Conference a panel discussed "The Next Big Thing Inc." in the area of hypertext and hypermedia. The Web has been the "Big Thing" during the past 10 years, but its success has also made it very difficult to find the appropriate information in an ocean of over 3 billion pages. Whereas search engines achieve incredible precision, they suffer from the same "one size fits all" approach that characterizes the Web sites they index. The paper defends the position that personalization, and in particular automatic personalization or adaptation, is the key to reach the goal of offering each individual user (or user group) the information they need. During the panel discussion there was debate about whether the user should always have access and control over the entire (hypertextual) information space. There were different views on whether the "right" to all the information is best guaranteed by offering tools that reduce the information space the user perceives so that the user can actually find and reach the information, or by offering unfiltered access to an ocean of information in which everything is available but in which perhaps nothing can be found. We argue in favor of adaptation but at the same time point out flaws in the way adaptive hypermedia has been used until now. The paper then proposes a new, modular adaptive hypermedia architecture that should lead to adaptive Web-based systems as the "Next Big Thing" indeed.

"The company is Israel-based MindCite, and its semantic-based software lets homeland security agencies and intelligence agencies collect, integrate, research, and analyze diverse types of information, from structured formats like databases and unstructured formats such as text, to solve crimes, crack cases and get alerts. The company's systems are installed in over a dozen countries, though not stateside yet. "

"Mainstream businesses increasingly are taking the semantic web seriously. Consider the U.K. Governments Technology Program's Market Blended Insight (MBI) project. While funded under that program as a three-year applied research project, it includes as part of its consortium the marketing departments of ParcelForce Worldwide, British Gas Business, AXA, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank (NAGE), 3M and pH Group. Having these partners on board helps ensure that the work it is doing to help companies improve their marketing activities has application in real-world scenarios. "