Notes from Wednesday morning Semantic Technology Conference

Here are my notes from Wednesday morning at

www.semantic-conference.com

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Wednesday, 6/17/2009

Executive Round Table: Semantic Search

Thompson, Carla, Guidewire Group
Moderator

Imielinski, Tomasz, Ask.com
...

Prevost, Scott, bing
Bing: Understand task and organizing.
Powerset: Understand meaning of question.

Norvig, Peter, Google, Inc.
Focus on comprehensive, accurate and fast.
Focus on engineering.

Berkan, Riza, hakia
Complete semantic search engine from botton up.
Focus on dynamic content.

Tunstall-Pedoe, William, True Knowledge
Platform that does direct question answering.
Inference engine and world knowledge base.

Tomkins, Andrew, Yahoo! Search
Semantic annotations on URLs.
SearchMonkey - Incorporate semantic data directly in user results.

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Semantic Solutions 10:15AM - 10:45AM

Glue: Leveraging Semantics To Connect People Around Things They Visit
Iskold, Alex, AdaptiveBlue
Technology - Introductory
Semantic Applications

Brings your friends to popular sites to let you know what they think
about bookes, music, movies, games, ... and other things your visit.

Connecting people around things.
E.G. You and friends visit book Kite Runner on different sites.
Glue understand you are interested in book (rather than site).
Take web pages and collapses them into objects of interest.

Glue
- Contextual: brings social net to existing web content
- Automatic: participate just by browsing
- web-wide: removes friction in networking - the network comes to your
  location

Technology
- Concepts: server-based XML schemas for things (nouns)
- Identity: Correlating objects across web sites using attribute
  matching and text normalization.
- Recognition: Uses Open APIs and proprietary recognition technology
  to automatically recognize objects in Pages, Links and Text.

Glue API
- Individual Attention
  Access user Lifestream and profiles
  Send updates into glue from your app
- Social Attention
  Lookup users interested in a given book, album, movie, ...
- Aggregate Attention
  Access Popular lists by Category and Stream GLue Activity
- Object Meta data
  Get meta data for pages on hundreds of popular sites
  Get links to objects around the web

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Exhibit Hall

Ontos (API) - like Calais, but can feed it your own tags
TextDigger - like Calais, but can feed it your own tags

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Semantic Solutions 11:45AM - 12:15PM

SearchMonkey and the Semantic Web
Haas, Kevin, Yahoo! Search
Technology - Intermediate
Developing Semantic Applications

SearchMonkey
- Open Platform for developers to use structured data
  to show more useful and relevant search results
- Use existing semantic data to mark up search results
- RDF, microformats
  hcard, hreview, hresume, hcalendar, rel-tag, rel-license, sfn, hatom, geo
- Use info from those formats to control formatting of output
- develop.yahoo.com/searchmonkey
- RDF/microformatted pages -> searchmonkey -> results with embedded RDFa

Other apps besides Search: BOSS
- Get access to raw RDF.
- Access to all semantic data that Yahoo! has collected
- develop.yahoo.com/search/boss