semantic

Most of you know that my job focuses on IBM's OmniFind enterprise search and text analytics products. And I've written before about semantic search—I've even written about what semantic search isn't. I keep talking about it because semantic search is probably the easiest to understand application of text analytics.

The days of keyword stuffing, single phrase optimization and concentrating only on incoming links to gain traffic are slowly being phased out as a more holistic approach to judging website content comes online. This new concept has many webmasters hopping, and it should. Latent semantic indexing is quickly becoming the wave of now.

Researchers at IBM Almaden have been developing a semantic search process that can delve into unstructured text to retrieve structured information.

You may have heard the term "semantic search," but do you really know what it is? Some people have very big ideas of how computers will understand the meaning of text, but today's semantic search falls far short of that. Regardless, what's possible today is still very useful. To understand how hard it is for computers to really understand the meaning of text, let's not look at understanding entire documents or even paragraphs. Let's not even look at sentences. No, let's start with something extremely simple: noun phrases.

Every day, we bring you news of the latest comings and goings in the search engine industry.  The names Google and Yahoo come up a lot . . . Xerox, not so much.  But it’s that last company that is preparing a semantics-based search engine.

Very rarely do I come across software that makes me go “WOW” Keep in mind that I read almost everything covering new social software. Microsoft has a project team working on a piece of software called SeaDragon. What is SeaDragon?

The language used to describe the Semantic Web is complicated enough – at a glance, it looks a bit quantum theory-ish, just enough to make your eyes roll back into your head to look for ways to kill themselves – but Tim Berners-Lee, who's responsible for all those Ws littering your URLs, inspired enough faith that whatever the Semantic Web was, it could be accomplished.

Innovation in making data relevant to the one or two words that we type into a search engine is Web 2.0. Adding to the plethora of data is the advent of social networking, Ajax; shared apps across the back end internet cloud, there are already frameworks that are proposed in making Web 3.0 and reputation 1.0 reliable in the greater context of the internet.