Archive for the ‘Semantic Web’ Category
Mahalo: human powered search March 22nd, 2008
I have known about Mahalo since about the time it launched and it hasn’t really appealed to me enough to use it seriously for anything. I think a human powered search engine feels a little inadequate compared to the raw processing power of a search engine like Google’s search and with new developments in the semantic search space, I wonder how Mahalo will fit into the search ecosystem.
Anyway, those meandering thoughts aside, I enjoyed this interview with Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo) and one of his directors which Robert Scoble posted the other day:
Looking at Mahalo a second time it is clear that my initial thoughts about Mahalo were pretty limited. Sure Mahalo is not going to have all the search results that Google, Yahoo! Search or even Live will have but Mahalo is focussed on accumulating the top 50 000 search results and when you consider your personal search habits, do you go far beyond the first or second page of your Google search results when looking for something?
Aside from Mahalo’s focus, Mahalo will also serve up search results from other search engines and services so it will also function as a kind of meta search service too. Here are a couple searches I ran for “27 Dinner” on Mahalo. Mahalo doesn’t have any direct search results for local dinner/event series yet. In this first image you can see a direct search for “27 Dinner” on Mahalo:
In this second image, you can see the Google search results under the Google tab:
… and under the Flickr tab:
What I also noticed is that if you scroll down in the Mahalo search results you will also see what seems to be an aggregated set of search results using the top search results from Google, Flickr, Technorati and the other services Mahalo plugs into.
Mahalo is a really interesting search engine and I think it warrants spending more time on it. There is a lot more to Mahalo I haven’t mentioned and which I probably don’t eve know about so be sure to go check it out. If you create an account, feel free to connect to me. My username is “pauljacobson” (without the quotation marks).
Technorati Tags:
search, mahalo, human powered search
Posted in Events, Search, Semantic Web | Comments (0)
Yahoo! embraces the Semantic Web in a big way March 13th, 2008
I am not sure if anyone has taken a look at this in much detail (I haven’t), but it looks like a pretty significant step …
Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
Stii, any thoughts?
Technorati Tags:
yahoo, semantic web, search, open architecture, open search
Posted in Companies, Search, Semantic Web, Sharing | Comments (2)
chilipod 1-9: Discussion with Paul Walsh about Content Labels June 3rd, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I continue my interview with Paul Walsh of Segala. We talk about Content Labels which are a fairly important and interesting component of the emerging Semantic Web. You can find out more about Content Labels here and you can find the Search Thresher plugin for Firefox here.
You may notice a change in the quality of this episode of chilipod. I have published this episode in mono to reduce the file size for download purposes. Let us know what you think?
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
content labels, paul walsh, segala, semantic web
Posted in People, Semantic Web, chilipod | Comments (0)
RSS to become a structured data delivery mechanism? April 8th, 2007
I just read a great post on Read/Write Web about RSS and its role as a content distribution mechanism. The post talks a bit about the history and structure of RSS and then considers whether it will be possible to extend RSS to deliver structured data. The example given is of a hypothetical bank that delivers bank statements through an extended version of RSS and in a format that your accounting software will understand as opposed to what I understand to be a variation of good old fashioned HTML or XML.
Being able to extend RSS or develop a similar delivery mechanism to RSS for structured data will go a long way towards helping create the much talked about Semantic Web. It would also make it possible for automated systems to take care of a range of every day tasks we have to deal with.
Technorati Tags:
rss, structured data, xml, delivery mechanism
Posted in Feeds, Semantic Web, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (0)
chilipod episode 5: DRM-free music April 3rd, 2007
In this episode of chilipod, we take a look at the following topics:
- The announcement that EMI will start selling DRM-free music at 256kbps, initially through the iTunes Store
- In our Semantic Web segment we chat about Content Labels (have a look at Segala’s Content Label category page for more information, especially this introduction); and
- a chat about Twitter which we recorded a little while ago from a privacy perspective.
If you are looking for the Firefox extension that enables Content Label views then you will find Search Thresher here.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
meaning on the web, web 3.0, content labels, segala, sematic web, emi, drm-free, drm, music, apple, itunes
Posted in Semantic Web, Sharing, chilipod | Comments (0)
Google: a semantic search engine? April 1st, 2007
I have been staring at this post from Read/Write Web about Google as a semantic search engine for a couple days now. It is a pretty interesting take on Google in the context of the Semantic Web thread. A lot of it has to do with the way Google offers alternative search parameters. An example given in the post is a search on the term “citizen” which yielded the following result as part of the search results (I’m not too sure where this came from though):
Whether Google is considered a semantic search engine really depends on your definition of “semantic” in the context of the Web and a search engine specifically. It is clear from the post that there are differing interpretations of the semantic web and what constitutes the semantic web and this would play into your thinking about this.
The conclusion of the post is a mixed one. On one hand Google demonstrates elements of what could be expected from a semantic search engine and on the other hand it isn’t quite there yet. I wonder if becoming a semantic search engine isn’t perhaps as a result of more evolved search algorithms - as the algorithms become more advanced, meaning begins to seep into the search results and the whole system begins to learn what we find meaningful in particular contexts.
Technorati Tags:
google, semantic web, semantic search engine, meaning, algorithms
Posted in Semantic Web | Comments (0)
Episode 4 of chilipod: The Semantic Web March 18th, 2007
In this episode of chilipod Victoire talks about the Semantic Web which is the next stage in the Web’s evolution. Although it is still early days for the Semantic Web, we are going to be talking about it on an ongoing basis because it really represents the next phase for the Web and Web applications and services. chilibean is about new media and this means we are about developments like the Semantic Web as much as we are about social media. It is really all about taking available technologies and using them to address challenges companies and people like you and me face on a daily basis. Stii has also been publishing some good stuff so take a look at his posts as well.
This episode comes in at around 10 minutes and I’d like to get some feedback from our listeners about your preferred duration of the podcast? We sometimes have enough material to record episodes that could easily run to 30 minutes or more (the last episode was a good example) and I’d like to know if you would prefer we keep the episodes shorter or can we let our hair down (figuratively in my care cause I don’t have much to let down)?
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Tags: semantic web, knuru, semantic search, meaning on the web, web 3.0
Posted in Podcasts, Semantic Web, chilipod | Comments (3)
Freebase and the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) March 12th, 2007
Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media) took a look at a new service called Freebase which a vanguard of the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0 - let’s try not to use this term though?). I have applied for an account (the service is still in testing) and will really give it a go if/when I receive an invitation to try it out but based on O’Reilly’s post, Freebase is a mix between Google and Wikipedia in form and with added semantic functionality. If you read O’Reilly’s post you’ll read about a search he did on his company. There were some empty fields in the search results (which included the fact that O’Reilly Media is a company) which he completed with details of the company’s registration and place of business as well as its subsidiary companies. These edits created entries in Freebase for those subsidiary companies themselves. He did comment that the service isn’t quite right though. He edited the entry on "Tim O’Reilly" he expected that it would have updated the entry on himself and it didn’t. It may even have created a new entry under that name.
Freebase has also been discussed in the same sentence as Google (Freebase also has the goal of organising the world’s information) although what sets Freebase apart is that it adds structure to the data it collects and organises whereas search engines typically rely on their algorithms. SearchEngineWatch.com asks whether Freebase is a Google-killer or an over-hyped startup? I wouldn’t say it is an over-hyped startup unless that hype includes the notion that this is the beginning of the end for Google. Google still has a few things up its sleeve including its own equivalent service called Google Base:
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google (if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items’ relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.
Google Base is a free service that enables you to submit up to 20MB of your data in 15 different file formats for inclusion in the database.
The example in the screenshots on the Google Base site is a recipe submission and you can see from the next screenshot how various attributes can be added to a submission.
This is where the wiki-style editing comes in. You, as a user of the service, gets to add attributes which have meaning for you to an item in the database (this is also something Freebase permits). It also provides an RSS feed for searches so you can track submissions based on your search criteria. I wonder how much you could start to use this service much as you would track items in Technorati? It would be interesting to see how the results measure up.
It is pretty easy to submit content of your own. I noticed that there isn’t much about chilibean so I added an entry myself. The entry is categorised as a company profile:
I can see how posting content to Google Base could quickly become addictive. It is really easy to add the content to the site. I don’t really see how a user would add attributes to existing entries though so my comments about adding attributes seem to be limited to items you have already posted. On one hand this can be a good thing because it limits opportunities for vandalism but on the other hand it limits how useful the service can be because other users can’t add attributes about the entry that have meaning for them and possibly many others.
This is definitely a space to keep an eye on going forward. In the meantime, this is a good opportunity to add entries about yourselves and your businesses to the database and add some "local is lekker" to the mix.
Tags: freebase, google base, semantic web, web 3.0, meaning
Posted in Semantic Web | Comments (2)