One entrant in the quest for the semantic web, ePrecis, could surpass efforts already under way and may be good enough to grab the interest of the big search players.
Henry Neils posted a brief description of the ePrcis technology, saying it “creates abstracts from any text document.” Richard McManus goes a bit further in unearthing the real impact of the technology, as written by IBM linguistic staffer James Matthewson:
“ePrcis is not a program per se, but a C++ language application programmer interface (API) that can be embedded in any number of applications to return relevant outputs given a wide variety of natural language inputs. In addition to plugging into Web browsers or search engines, it could plug into word processing programs to automatically provide abstracts, executive summaries, back-of-the book indexes, and writing or translation support.”
Though it is available online as a free search engine test, the technology as described by Matthewson sounds more like something that could distract Google, Yahoo, and MSN from their AOL chase for a few minutes. Matthewson wrote how ePrcis fulfills the promise of the Semantic Web without any heavy lifting by site publishers:
“And unlike the Semantic Web, ePrcis requires no work by the webmasters of existing Web sites. It does all the work to gather the data, analyze it, and produce the output.”
All Bill Gates would have to do is write a check, and suddenly MSN Search jumps right to Web 2.0 status upon integration of the technology.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
