Semantic Web Has Spawned Trivia

What ever happened to Hexbot?

Semantic web actually has a growing bunker of trivia tidbits.

In spring 2004 a steady barrage of press releases heralded HexBot as an all around digital life form that was designed to do it all. But what happened to this semantic web prodigy? The domain name has been sold– Hexbot MIA.

Hmmmm. Maybe the demise of the former natural language search engine could have been portended in the word “secratery.” Can’t spell can’t sell the next big thing in search I reckon.

New Biomedical Semantic Search Engine

GoPubMed’s Cool Feature…   

GoPubMed is a new semantic search engine designed to deliver the ultimate research muscle to the biomedical, medical, and life sciences realm. Researchers, scientists, and general users may gain quicker more “cross-pollinated” search results for deeply layered data requests.

One of the more intriguing features of GoPubMed is the “Hot Research.” This is a nifty trend-spotter: the site’s example offers a side-by-side graphical comparison that maps trends in alzheimer’s research. There are also tools to pan for statistics on certain study authors, cities, and journals. For instance, find out who is most feverishly carving away at research related to, let’s say, neurolinguistics, from which city(ies) the most published work is coming from on the topic, and plot all of it on a cluster map of the world. Or find out who is collaborating with whom on neurolinguistics–see it visually presented as a cartographic mash-up of scientific collaboration, a partially connected mesh network, if ever I saw one.

Search results are presented with highlighted text. There are quite a few options for targeting more relevant results: A left-hand navigation field displays a “semantic” list of category choices collected from Gene Ontology (GO) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) classes. Use this to pinpoint results more rapidly. Also search results are accessorized with button options: link to related Wikipedia articles, “toggle” document views, and even flag a result that does not belong.

GoPubMed is on the leading edge of accessible search tools for life sciences and biomedical work groups. Many corporations already possess robust semantic middleware behind closed doors. GoPubMed attempts to give users a variety of data formats. Might we see these same components slightly renovated for other types of semantic tools? Could it be that we may see the semantic web and natural language search grow more rapidly when the medical and corporate demands (knowledge “needers”) lead the way?

Who is Cyc?

Some search engines vie for fairy dust, others just ante up the goods.

Semantic search engines vie to harness the same fairy dust as did Google–once upon a time. But charismatic, enigmatic, and dismissive geeky upstarts that make billions upon billions of dollars of course earn as many foes as they do dough. My point is that Google’s limelight is still enviable and new search engines like the mysterious Powerset and Hakia are in line.

But, outside the West Coast Search celebrity there are other semantic web forces to be reckoned with that have actually been chipping away at the natural language lexicon for years.

Cyc, “the world’s largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine,” is already a working product for corporate and industrial users. I’ve just happened on it and am still trying to digest the literature, but it reminds me of a mini IBM WebFountain, without the supercomputing gusto, but, a powerful engine, nevertheless, that has already “learned” <…..THIS much……>

“What does Cyc know?” According to founder and developer, Doug Lenat, Cyc is able to negotiate this question: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

Where can I get my very own Cyc?

Like most open source systems designed for industrial applications, Cyc is not nearly as consumer-friendly as a Powerset or Hakia. There is no intuitive, slick little interface. Instead the Cyc main page smacks of the magic language of software developers and Unix users and computer wizards. This is middleware land, Middle Earth, Hobbit-ville. Which makes it all the more enigmatic–I want one.

Semantic Suggestion

New Search “Signage” Fills the Gap Between Now and Later

On 9/28 the Hakia blog post stirred the pot of interesting semantic web issues–my essential takeway: are we at a point in which we are technologically mature enough to handle SW, or are our behaviors and satisfactions attached to technology (current search engines) too rooted to the Now?

Dr. Berkan proposes that SW is not an “if” but a “when” an undeniable force in the evolution of search.

This got me thinking about a couple current search tools that offer a wide range of semantic suggestion, search add-ons that point in the direction of SW:

• Keyword search suggestion has been offering syntactic, sometimes clumsy semantic suggestions for awhile now–you start typing a word in the search box and a drop down menu offers increasingly granular suggestions with each passing keystroke–can be quite distracting, but seriously indicative of the wild assortment of search terms people use. Maybe we will reminisce about it someday–it’ll become an ancient and primitive syntactic tool–like cave hieroglyphics (though some would likely argue for the sophistication of hieroglyphics).

• Answer Tips, from Answer.com. I just experienced a webpage enabled with Answer Tips. I can double click on any word on the page and get a spam-free pop-up window from Answer.com that defines, describes, and otherwise offers a range of encyclopedic and dictionary reference–for ANY WORD ON THE PAGE.

• Hakia’s ScoopBar makes it possible to semantically manage data. It involves downloading to the Firefox browser, but promises highlighted webpage text, and the Scoop tool allows users to save results in offline folders accessible later. This is a bit like Google Notebooks, but in an offline format. (I have not used ScoopBar yet, and I’m curious b/c I’ve tried G Notebooks on a couple occasions to see if I could find a more convenient and intuitive way to corral a lot of research data. But the task has just seemed more cumbersome than convenient.) So ScoopBar semantically manages, semantic results.

• Google Maps allow users to personalize–overlay data in various formats that can be accessed via place markers. Click or mouseover a map placemarker and a pop-up data window opens like a new stratosphere of semantic information relative to a geographic location. G Maps can be made public, usable by the wider web search audience.

One syntactic foot in front of the semantic other.