Sunday, July 30, 2006

Thinking about search engines

Berners-Lee argued that part of the Semantic Web is about identifying the originator of information, and identifying why the information can be trusted, not just the content of the information itself at a conference in Boston sponsered by AAAI last Tuesday. Semantic Web could be a solution to the problem of the Internet deception through identifying the web content creators. This association between Sementic Web and author identification is also mentioned in another paper that introduces the project Flink.
This argument leads to thinking about the ontology again. If you google any keyword, you would get the first several results by ontology. You google a person, you get his/her weblog, since it collects one's most complete information. If it doesn't exist, you get one's homepage hosted in one's working place. If it doesn't exist, ... Anyway, the web sources are more heterogenous than only to search a single databases like InforZoom by A9 people search. If you google a book, you get its Amazon link and its authors blog, such as Smart Mob and Freakonomics etc. If you search for a film, you get one entry from the imdb and so on and so forth. This ontology based search is not in line with Google's PageRank method, except that for example each book metioned in a web site is linked by Amazon and each paper by a DOI etc. Certainly, each keyword has various contexts, like the typical example of "Java" for computer scientists. In this case, the temporal context can confine the ontology. Before the java language was defined and the coffee was produced, it refers certainly to the island. So before the Da Vinci Code was pictualized, the search result was a book. Google might have used this search criteria, since Google Trends has been launched and could be used to get the ontology based on temporal facts.
Ontology based search engine might strengthen the web giants such as Amazon, WikiPedia in each field. Is it good to solve the problem of the Internet deception?

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Bled, Ljubljana and Begunje in Slovenia

Before I began to attend the Prolearn Summer School in Bled, I joined in the fieldtrip on Sunday, 4th of June. Slovenia is not that large. It took only 2 and a half hour from Bled, which is located in the North of the country to the coast in the South. A nag en route was impossible because we met the best tour guide we have ever met. The most group members gave Sascha this esteem. He did not stop one minute to introduce Slovenia to the guests.

Tranversing the gold coast as well as the show windows in Trieste, we reached our first stop Piran, a mediaterean town. The market places and the colorful walls remind me of the squares in Rome or Florence. One colleague from Ljubljana said that she ever drove 2 hours from the capital to Piran, just to sit in a cafeteria on the sea shore for several hours.

After lunch in Strunjan, we visited the largest cave of Europe, the Postojna Cave. Sascha doesn't recommend the cave very much because it is somewhat commercialzed. He was proud of the caves he and his friends ever discovered by themselves. I could not notice the commercial issues since I have not visited any large cave since 28 years ago.

Then we visited the most important sightseeings in Ljubljana in the bus. The statue of Julia and France Preseren, the Slovenian national poet is one of the most impressive sightseeings, because Sascha had told so many of his stories and tragedy and recited his poems. The stories had almost moved every girl in the group. On the way back to Bled, Sascha did not have a lot to say, so the topic switched to the fabulous stories and conventions of his hometown, the most beautiful town with the most beautiful folks music in his opinion. In the end, we figued it out. It is Begunje.