Bruce Whealton: On Being a Poet and Other Existential Ideas

via pcworld.comSo, Google will beincreasingly able to understand the meaning of the phrases and questions you put into the search engine. This is new. For the most part, when you put a question into google, it looks for a set of keywords that are grouped together and include the words in your question. For example, asking Google What is the capital of New York will result in Google searching for websites that have the words capital and new york in them – using the old keyword only way of searching and indexing the web. That is different than Google actually understanding the question. So, when we talk about google or a search engine understanding the question or phrase presented to it, that is something new.

Yahoo is actually ahead of this and is using the code that is inside a webpage to help it understand the meaning in the webpage content that it is indexing. Go to http://www.opencalais.com to learn about how you can improve your website for the semantic web and help others to find you.
Bruce Whealton

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seeks to improve by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. lists “11 approaches that join semantics to search”^[1], and Hildebrand et al. ^[2] provide an overview that lists and identifies other uses of semantics in the .

Guha et al.^[3] distinguish two major forms of search: Navigational and Research. In , the user is using the as a to navigate to a particular intended document. Semantic Search is not applicable to navigational searches. In Research Search, the user provides the with a phrase which is intended to denote an object about which the user is trying to gather/research information. There is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. Semantic Search lends itself well here.

Rather than using ranking algorithms such as ‘s to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant . In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.

Other authors primarily regard as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies as found on the Semantic Web ^[4]. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time.

[edit] Disambiguation

In order to understand what a user is searching for, word sense disambiguation must occur. When a term is ambiguous, meaning it can have several meanings (for example, if one considers the lemma “bark“, which can be understood as “the sound of a dog,” “the skin of a tree,” or “a three-masted sailing ship”), the disambiguation process is started, thanks to which the most probable meaning is chosen from all those possible.

Such processes make use of other information present in a semantic analysis system and takes into account the meanings of other words present in the sentence and in the rest of the text. The determination of every meaning, in substance, influences the disambiguation of the others, until a situation of maximum plausibility and coherence is reached for the sentence. All the fundamental information for the disambiguation process, that is, all the knowledge used by the system, is represented in the form of a , organized on a conceptual basis.

In a structure of this type, every lexical concept coincides therefore with a node and is linked to others by specific semantic relationships in a hierarchical and hereditary structure. In this way, each concept is enriched with the characteristics and meaning of the nearby nodes.

Every node of the network (called Synset) groups a set of synonyms which represent the same lexical concept (called Synsets) and can contain:

• single lemmata (‘seat’, ‘vacation’; ‘work’, ‘quick’; ‘quickly’, ‘more’, etc.)
• compounds (‘non-stop’, ‘abat-jour’, ”)
• collocations (‘credit card’, ‘university degree’, ‘treasury stock’, ‘go forward’, etc.).

The semantic relationships (links), which identify the semantic relationships between the synsets, are the order principals for the organization of the concepts.

[edit] See also

• Semantic web
• Semantic Unification
• Natural

[edit] References

1. ^ Breakthrough Analysis: Two Nine Types of Semantic Search
2. ^ Semantic Search Survey
3. ^ www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p779/ess.
4. ^

Several scientific events cover the topic of explicitly, such as the Semantic Search 2008 Workshop at ESWC’08 and the Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval at ECIR’08.

[show] Semantic Web Background World Wide Web  · Internet  · Hypertext  · Databases  · Semantic networks  · Ontologies Sub-topics Linked Data  · Data Web  · Hyperdata  · Dereferenceable URIs  · Rule bases  · Data Spaces Applications Semantic wiki · Semantic publishing ·  · Semantic  · Semantic advertising · Semantic reasoner · Semantic matching · Semantic mapper ·  · Semantic analytics · Semantic Related topics Folksonomy  · Library 2.0 · Web 2.0  · Open Database Connectivity  · References  · Information architecture  ·  · Collective intelligence  · Topic Maps  · Mindmapping  · Metadata · Geotagging · Description logic Standards  : (/  · Notation 3  · Turtle  · N-Triples)  · SPARQL  · URI  ·  · Schemas, Ontologies & Rules : RDFS  · OWL  · Rule Interchange Format  · Semantic Semantic Annotation : RDFa  · eRDF  · GRDDL  · Microformats Common Vocabularies : FOAF  · SIOC  · Dublin  · SKOS Others: Plain Old Semantic

[show] Internet search Types Web (List) · Collaborative  · Metasearch engine Tools Local search · Vertical search · marketing · optimization · Search oriented architecture · Selection-based search · Social search · Document retrieval · Text  ·  · Multisearch · Federated search · Search aggregator · Index/Web indexing · Focused crawler · trap · Robots exclusion standard · Distributed  ·  · Website mirroring software ·  · Voice search · Human  · Natural  · Web query classification Applications Image search · Video  · Enterprise search · Protocols and standards  · Search/Retrieve  · Search/Retrieve via URL · OpenSearch · Representational State Transfer · Website Parse Template · Wide Area Information Servers See also  · Desktop search

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search“

Categories: Semantic Web | Internet search engines

Semantic Search offers more intelligent searching of the web. This is great for research or finding what is out on the web when you don’t already know what you want or are seeking. This is the web 3.0, the semantic web about which I have been writing recently. Semantics deals with the science of meaning in language. As a writer, poet and technology person, I find this very fascinating.
Bruce Whealton

Founded in 1991, The Cara Program is a Chicago-based non-profit that empowers men and women affected by homelessness and poverty with the skills, confidence and resources to secure and sustain quality jobs and achieve long-term success. Since their founding, they have placed more than 2,500 individuals into full-time, rewarding positions with leading Chicago area companies such as ABM Lakeside, The Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan Chase, Sodexho, and more.

The Cara Program sought a redesign of their static website, one that engaged visitors by quickly delivering key information that was clear and concise, and could be easily maintained by Cara staff. Being a non-profit website, they also needed a way to accept donations, recruit volunteers, allow visitors to join their mailing list, and recruit sponsors and employment partners. In addition to being able to simply accept donations, they wanted to eventually “empower” donors to use social media and/or other outlets to spread the word, champion their cause and help others donate or otherwise support. The ability to share some content also needed to be a feature on The Cara Program “child” program websites: Clean Slate, Quad Communities and Career Pathways.

Duo Consulting was chosen to implement their goals and Drupal was the platform chosen.

Why Drupal?

Drupal was the platform of choice because it provided the features and functionality the Cara Program desired, and integrated with CiviCRM, a free, open source CRM and their current source of event management.

Design and Architecture Direction

When we approached the new architecture for The Cara Program, we knew there would be some challenges. On the old site, it took a lot of reading and scrolling before you could understand a program’s purpose, and what it did for the students. We needed to tell the story of The Cara Program concisely, so that new users could orient themselves to the program and partner programs without having to wade through 2 pages of content. We also needed to allow users to take a deep dive into detailed information when it was relevant to their search.

The solution we came up with involved simplifying the main navigation into 3 main buckets: a discovery bucket for users looking to find out what The Cara Program is and what it does (What We Do); a metric bucket for users wanting to know the effectiveness and reach of the program through statistics and explanations (The Impact), and finally, a call to action bucket for users looking to get involved (What You Can Do).

Within each bucket, we wanted to provide two tracks for accessing information. The first track was the fast track for users skimming the website. This included short one-to-two sentence overviews, without page refreshing. The second track was integrated into the first track, so when a user found the category relevant to their research, they were given an option to read more about that topic and dive deep into the content. This content strategy allowed users who skim information to skim more effectively, and those doing in-depth research to easily access full pages of information.

We attended motivations, met volunteers, and toured classrooms. One theme from all of our experiences is that The Cara Program was all about movement: movement to get your attention, movement to take your life in a new positive direction, movement to make a difference today.

We were inspired to make sure the site design captured the energy and movement of everyone involved. We went to work on UI patterns like the infinite image scroller on the homepage, attracting the user with vibrant imagery. Video and events weren’t buried on an internal page; they expanded to a full frame on the homepage. We also placed the private and commercial donors into a ticket stream on the bottom of each page, to show how their contributions help keep the program running.

Functionality

Homepage

The homepage slideshow is controlled by 2 Views (well, 1 View with 2 block displays); one that displays the 3 scrolling images shown with Semantic Views (so we could easily control the markup, which can become an issue when using custom JavaScript), and another that displays the global text in the top left area. The scrolling effect is all frontend, created using some jQuery/JavaScript niceness.
The 3 sections immediately below the scrolling images are controlled by a View, which displays a nodequeue of “homepage spotlight” content.. Content added to the queue can have a scheduled publish or unpublished date, allowing for automatic promotion or demotion. Each display style has a particular taxonomy term associated with it. Depending on which term you select, the output will be styled to match. A video will display the play button with custom text, an event will display the enlarged date, and announcements will display the map of Chicago. Clicking on either one of those items replaces the scrolling images with the content from that item (again, some jQuery/JavaScript niceness).

The scrolling ticker in the footer area is a list view, which is modified to scroll using the front end.

Inner Pages

The inner pages generally follow one of three formats:

• Tabbed display of teaser content below the main navigation
• Display of image below the main navigation and links in the sidebar
• Menu Block display only (no image or content below main navigation)

To help accomplish this, all content is categorized by the section in which it appears (“what we do”, “the impact” etc). A page may also contain a secondary tag, which is useful for other reasons. Depending on what “section” you are in (or menu path or both), content will be displayed differently.

Clicking on any of the 3 main links at the top takes you to a page that displays a View using the Tabs display, showing the teaser of the first 3-5 items in that section (see note on displaying content for someone skimming the website). Clicking the “learn more” link takes you to a page with no image or content below main navigation, but 4-6 links to other pages within that menu, which in turn are created using the Menu Block module.

Clicking on any content in the “About” section (content in the About Us menu) takes you to a page that displays an image, which has been assigned to the same “section” as the page below the main navigation. This gives you the option toadd a unique image for each page in the “About” section.

Key Modules

For the Drupal pros out there, here are some of the key modules we used for the site:

CiviCRM

CiviCRM was chosen because in our experience, organizations with needs like The Cara Program’s benefitted greatly from a CRM solution, as opposed to a few forms that just capture data. CiviCRM provided the ability to easily create custom forms that collected various types of information from collected data group volunteers, sponsors, donors, and mailing list subscribers, and track all activities (follow up phone calls, appointments, meeting, email, snail mail) with those persons. Custom reports on this data could then be generated be exported in various formats, for potential import into desktop applications. It also provided the ability to potentially enable personal campaign pages, so donors could spearhead donation drives and we could provide them with the ability to embed donation widgets on their website.

Domain Access

This was allowed all four sites to share the same codebase, database and some of the same content, which meant new features enabled on one website were immediately available to all others, and upgrades and modifications to Drupal and/or contrib. modules only needed to happen once.

Honorable Module Mentions

Context: Used primarily to set theme variables when in certain “sections” of site.
Views (of course).
CCK (of course).

This site uses the Drupal Content Management System. I am currently setting up a Drupal site for Neighbor House of Hillsborough – we serve the homeless and needy in northern orange county, NC. The Cara Program serves the homeless in Chicago. I look forward to learning about how they are using the software to reach their goals and become successful. Read about them… Please become a fan of us on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Neighbor-House-of-Hillsborough/141458569206184
We need more fans to get a custom url.
Bruce

A very useful video on the semantic web… What is the semantic web? Web 3.0? Enabling humans and machines to better communicate. Most of the web and knowledge out there is not meaningful in itself. A computer cannot understand what is on a web page. The semantic web seeks to create a language that will allow computers and software to understand the data that is represented, stored and displayed, or communicated. This is a way of giving meaning to the data.

Currently websites are displayed with HTML. This describes how to present the information, knowledge or data on the web. It doesn’t however define or describe what the data represents. For example, if I put up a web page that represents my resume. In typical HTML, I have tags that describe how to display the information. In the semantic web, using XML tags, I’ll be able to represent or describe the fact that the data represents a resume, my resume, about me. The challenge is to create a vocabulary, an ontology that will allow different agents, that is different computer systems (hardware and software) to communicate and understand this vocabulary. Think of the challenge of an English speaking person looking at a resume written in an Asian, eastern language, say Chinese.

Bruce Whealton

This looks like an interesting way to share one’s ideas and knowledge in a variety of areas. I like this. Check it out.

I’m the June Editor’s Pick Poet on “The Horror Zine.” Check it out! Four of my poems are here.