A Medley of Semantically Related News Snippets
Today witnessed a number of thought-provoking news publications from various sources, from a newspaper in Madrid to ReadWriteWeb. My first observation this morning, in a newspaper circulated in Madrid’s metro, is worth mentioning, as it demonstrates the triumphant transition made by Web 2.0 into the general public’s eye, as well as recognising the need for technologies to aid users in activities such as managing their social profiles and their blog profiles. The daily cartoon sketch shows two female students seated in a university computer lab. One asks the other: “How’s it going?”. Her friend answers: “Ugh……..I’m updating my social profile in 18 social networks, changing my website’s photos, and renewing the contents of my blog”. The response is: “And on top of all that, they expect us to study”. Although the underlying issues provoked in this cartoon have been partly resolved by initiatives such as Google Open Social, there is still significant room for improvement.
Besides the spine-chilling news for Google that Powerset unleashed its test version of a semantic search engine for Wikipedia for public use on Monday (which I will not go into here, as there are currently countless articles floating around the Web discussing what some have coined the “Google Killer”), another search engine, entitled Uptake, was launched today. Uptake, formerly known as Kango, is a travel search engine which extracts information from more than 1000 travel sites in order to construct a database of over 400,000 US hotels and activities. Uptake has built its database from consumer reviews, opinions and descriptions on these sites, and has constructed an ontology from metadata applied to the content of these sources. One of the more recent Natural Language Processing Techniques Uptake applies is Sentiment Analysis, also referred to as Opinion Mining, which uses syntactic parsing to extract words to indicate, for example, favourable sentiment towards a hotel, such as “good time”, “fantastic view” or “relaxed atmosphere”, and distinguishes positive sentiment from negative sentiment.
Today also saw the move of Jeremy Carroll, lead architect on the Open Source Jena Toolkit at HP, to TopQuadrant, a leading Semantic Web company, as Chief Product Architect.
Tags: ADN, Jeremy Carroll, Powerset, Semantic Web, Sentiment Analysis, Uptake, web 2.0, Web 3.0