Wolfram Alpha is a new project by Steven Wolfram, british mathematician, physician and creator of Mathematica - technical computing application. This week Wolfram annouced that his company is going to launch new search engine on May. it is going to be named Wolfram Alpha. Known as innovative and good in writing computing algorhytms Wolfram may creata something really big. From what we could have read in the media buzz on Wolfram Alpha is going to be combination of semantic search engine with question gathering one.

The main innovation is fact that WA is going to generate answers in real time, without gathering them previously. It is something tottaly opposite to what we could have seen , for example, in Ask.com. Answers are “computed” from unstructurized data processed by engine’s algorhytms and than answers are generated. These algorhytms are said to be based on natural language, which is fully understood by the engine. Answers are going to be given in plain language and contain extract from indexed data.

Interesting thing is that index for this search engine is not like traditional one - created by some crawlers from data of web-origin and stats. Some parts of WA’s index are large databeses from various fields, huge amounts of information about physical world is gathered in them - WA is going to offer more formal sort of knowledge than for example Google, that bases on different types of media information, which often is informal.

Right now the project is in private beta phase.  You can ask for invitation or subscribe for newsletter.

Questions we can aks at this moment are concerned on the nature of the results given by WA, under some assumptions this project might look like step back. Is it going to be improved Wikipedia, with formal and credible knowledge? What about network business model - if users are not going to be contributors at the same time, would they like to use it, if the knowledge is not going to be democratized?

-mw

On Tuesday, February 17, 2009 in Washington D.C. conference on Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be held. Project10x is responsible for organizing this event. Main topic will be role of information and communication technologies in an era of connected governance.

Key questions this workshop explores:

• What is the significance of connected governance in the Obama administration?
• What role does cloud computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 semantic technology play in an era of connected governance?
• What immediate steps towards connected governance should government agencies take?

The purpose of this conference is several-fold, namely to:

• Explore how we can operationalize this vision of connected governance,
• Demonstrate the kinds of changes that are coming to next stage web-based systems in government, and
• Map the role of information and communication technologies (specifically, cloud computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 semantic technologies) in the evolution of government information systems from e-gov (silos with web front ends) to connected governance (e.g. distributed social computing environments for collaborative work, information sharing, knowledge management, and participatory decision-making.)
• Discuss near-term steps towards connected governance that every agency can take.

Conference Agenda

The full conference agenda is posted at the following URL:

From E-Gov to Connected Governance - The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in an Era of Connected Governance

Highlights of the conference program include the following:

• Our keynote sessions begin by highlighting recent findings, conclusions and recommendations of a UN study that examined the current state, direction and evolution of e-government worldwide. The second keynote features running your organization on semantics, presented by the Dutch government.
• Following the keynote, we set the stage for the morning’s panel session with an overview presentation by Brand Niemann and Mills Davis, that outlines the role of Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, and Web 3.0 semantic technologies in and era of connected governance. This presentation highlights new concepts and practices of connected governance, the role of information and communication technologies in realizing this vision, near-term steps towards connected governance that every agency can take.
• Following the overview, we introduce a panel discussion of leading technologists, invite them to tell us briefly about the capabilities they provide, the problems they solve, and the value their solutions bring, and to discuss how the capabilities they provide might be combined to further enhance the value to government, business, and citizenry in the era of connected governance.
• After lunch, the conference features demos of next generation capabilities and solutions for connected governance. Each panelist has the opportunity (about 10 minutes) to present.  A topic we have asked presenters to feature is what sort of free trial, sand box, or quickstart package(s) they offer so that government agencies can access to learn more, or get started.
• Also, the conference will announce a program of briefings, technical training to build skills with Web 2.0, cloud computing and Web 3.0 semantic technologies, and services to support pilots of connected governance solutions. These programs are produced by Semantic Exchange and Semantic Communities in association with industry experts and leading vendors.
• Call to action: this conference asks government agencies and system integrators to sponsor and undertake pilot projects that integrate best of breed cloud computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 semantic technology capabilities into next generation solutions for collaborative work, transparent information sharing, and knowledge management, and connected governance.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009.
Morning session: 8:30 am EST to 12:00 noon.
Afternoon session: 1:00 pm EST to 4:00 pm EST.

Computer Science Corporation, Executive Briefing Center, Falls Church, VA.

• Address: 3170 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, VA, Executive Briefing Center. Free Parking close-by or a short cab or bus ride from the Dunn Loring Metro Station.
• Accommodations: Marriott Fairview Park

The conference will be bradcasted via WebEx.

-mw

Libris is a swedish search engine geared towards searching for books, gathered in swedish universities libraries. Since now it added an option of adding semantic data to records from catalogues. System bases on existing ontologies like DC, SKOS, FOAF and Bibliontology, but also offers references to other web resources like DBpedia.

Librarian resources data published as Linked Data enables to integrate data from catalogues with Web. Simillar attempt have been taken recently by authors of LCSH project, who were trying to include Library of Congress resources into semantic network, but due to unofficiality of whole process project was closed.

-mw

True Knowledge released new version of its product, you can try freshly improved features and smoothed inequalities. True knowledge as answer search engine aspire to analyse query semantically and serve its users a ready answer.  At the moment TK can connect facts and objects from database of almost 120,000,000 facts and 5,000,000 things. These amount of data is impressive. But is it enough to give precise answers for all questions that users might like to ask?

Probably it not enough, as long as human’s creativeness is not limited and world still goes round. More important thing is how efficient TK is in analysing queries. It deals quite well with precisely formulated queries like “date of birth of William Shakespeare” but it has problems with “when william shakespeare was born?”. It looks like this is a sort of a law that using semantical search engines users have to use plain equivalent elipsises. However TK sometimes struggles with more complicated questions, the mechanism of narrowing the search or giving the engine some hints on how to interpret your query, it does good work.

If you found answer, you’ve just got from TK, not satisfactory or not true you can take ‘disagree’ option and add knowledge that is more relevant in your opinion. While adding the knowledge TK ask series of questions that avail it to precise how interpret that knowledge - see the screen shot below:

TK has enourmous potential to become one of most accurate answer search engines. Service structure is already well developed, at the moment its owners should face the need of gathering varied gruop of users eager to contribute by expanding databases of knowledge. Bigger amount of data ready to be analysed should eliminate problems with queries interpretation.

To learn more watch True Knowledge video demo below:

-mw

Google has introduced new feature to its search engine, semantic analysis of query with providing the answer for our question. It is possible to formulate a question and get answer for it at the top of list of results. At the moment number of answerable questions is seriously limited, but still impressive. Semantic analysis can deal just with recognizing geographical names, can distinuish famous people and their relatives, provide dates of birth and death of famous people, but also answers for questions such as “what is XY famous for?”, “who is the author of book X?” or “who is the president of X?”. Data extraction processed from all search results seems to be quite advanced. In addition with each answer we get the refference to its source.

Although it seems to work efficiently, all names have to be given in full versions - like Frederic Chopin insted of Chopin. There are also some problems with names of companies - algrithm does not deal with abbreviations.

So far Google didn’t annouce any official statement or explanation how does it work. It looks like algorithm was based on extracting structural data from RDF and HTML as well. Main improvement is introducing mechanism that analyze the query in order to define relations between objects and if these relations are clear the answer is displayed separately from other results.

It can be a breakthrough in semantic web developement, ability of deriving the meaning from websites content and extracting the data into answer enable to save time by removing the need of crawling through search results. Except for that, these feature seems to be a foundation for further improvements - if we can get answers for simple questions why not try to get answers for logical questions and than why not ask questions in more informal language, not with plain words?

-mw