Is Everything Miscellaneous? June 22, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Information retrieval.2 comments
David Weinberger is promoting his book Everything is Miscellaneous and there are videos both of the talk he gave at Google and the talk he gave at Yahoo. The Google talk is more “polished” in some ways (PPT charts etc.) but the Yahoo talk is more like a fire-side chat, which I prefer.
His argument, in a nutshell, is that society, media, authorities, libraries etc. have placed constraints (i.e. limitations) on how we organize things (information in particular) by imposing an (arbitrary) order (e.g. library catalogs, newspaper sections, TV schedules) controlled by “experts”. Now, however, the new-world order, empowered by collaborative tools and common spaces on the web (Flickr etc.) is democratic – we can (individually and collectively) define our own order on things (e.g. by tagging things via folksonomies.) Nothing belongs to fixed categories anymore everything should be classified under “miscellaneous”.
Seadragon June 18, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Data Mining, Information retrieval, Visualization.2 comments
Have a look at this 8-minute video of Seadragon, the Microsoft Labs application which demonstrates how a 3-d model of Notre Dame can be induced from a large number of photo-stills (thanks to Glen for pointing this out.) Some aspects of the demo are based on “Photosynth“, which you can try on your PC (DirectX-based, I believe.)
Now, imagine a generalization of this to the world of scientific knowledge that could be induced from scholarly books and articles. In fact, you could see that there may be large numbers of ways in which documents could be “mapped” in this way. The advantage of a building is that it’s fixed in space and with a large collection of snapshots you can iterate to a “fixed point”. With concepts and words this may be a little more difficult….
OK, maybe that’s thinking too far ahead, but one can at least imagine all kinds of nested, next-generation “hyperlinks” from documents, to data, to images (e.g. of micro-organisms or stellar objects) to computer models (proteins, large molecules).
The Meaning of Semantics June 17, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Semantics, Statistical Semantics.3 comments
I worry that the use of “semantics” has become so ubiquitous as to be close to meaningless. For instance, a recent blog post on ReadWriteWeb claims that Hakia offers a practical, “semantics-based” solution to the information retrieval problem on the web.
Sometimes I think this use of “semantics” is intended merely to be synonymous with “better than syntax.” It must be the marketing department trying to commercialize (dumb down?) a complex notion. OntoSem (one of the tools on Hakia-Lab) has a respectable pedigree – even if you disagree with its premise. It is the brain child of Victor Raskin, founder of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at Purdue and author of Ontological Semantics, who has a web site to promote the book and its ideas.
