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

So-called semantic web industry is growing bigger every day. Although it still has not been defined what exactly semantic web mean, there is no week we do not get another semantic tool. It seems like the word semantic became a mantra. Although it is still hard to identify the web services that in fact are semantic. Many of them just have names based on the term. Before we check few quite new semantic tools let’s try to find an answer to the question why do we need semantic text analysis.

In my opinion the reason for starting whole this semantic affair was the need for improvement of queries understanging by search engines and the quality of search results. These two needs are mutually dependent and conditional. That is why the term semantic search - the most exciting combo - has not been embodied yet. Right now people are on the stage of developing automatic semantic analyses of text that would enable both: indexing of huge amounts of semantically analysed text and semantical analyses of queries, formulated as questions. There already exist several services that try to deal with such an analysis.

SemantalyzR is a service that enables getting the page’s content filtered and presented in form of tags, divided in categories such as: names, industry terms, countries, organizations and facilities etc. Unfortunately the engine is not precise enough. For example for DelveInto.Info most of the tags were drawed from the tag cloud, in addition fewof tags were not even separeted from each other, although that in fact they are two separete tags.

SemantalyzR gives also possibility to delve into specific tags to get a set of informations from different services such as twitter, flickr, wikipedia and dooblet. User gets the small compilation of previously analysed sites, where the specific tag was detected. The most interesting thing about that links-list is the fact it contains questions and answers from Yahoo Answers, regarding the searched term.

OpenCalais this tool offers two kinds of services, first is a text converter from simple text to .rdf coded file. It can be useful while making our webpage visible for semantic search engines. The other part of OpenCalais is a plug-in, that installed in our browser (currently only IE and FF available), can underline nouns in the content of currently browsed page with different colours, depending on which category the word was asosciated with. Similar solution was implemented in Mashlogic plugin, I wrote about. OpenCalais also enables to search the term with the most popular search engines, that are displayed in context menu, visible after setting the cursor on underlined term.

Interesting but unfortunately not available for the public tool is one developed by Cortex Intelligence, company specializing in Text Mining for the use of Competetive Intelligence. We can just watch a demo presentation. Its basis is the anlalyses of simple grammar functions and relations between the verbs and other sentence parts. Execpt for quick analyses of actions described in text without the need of reading the text we can also get text sorted to categories such as: date, companies or geographical names. This project is probably most advanced due to its grammar analyses. In fact it seems most semantic among all mentioned above (at least it is possible to make such a statemant basing on its demo).

-mw

Hakia announced on its blog the coming of new system of semantic data organization. System is called QDEX, what stands for Query Detection and Extraction. To explain how it works in the simpliest words, we should take a look at system’s name - query detection - the system scans through the page content and prepares the list of all possible queries (different length and combinations of terms).

Right now this project is in experimentary phase. The biggest problem is how to reduce the number of possible queries, or rather how to leave out equivalent queries.

SemantiNet released Headup - its new FireFox plugin, which is said to be semantic web search agent. Headup gathers information while we are browsing the Web and basing on the information about what we are viewing at the moment it suggests what also we might like. By now Headup monitors information from popular 2.0 services, such as Last.fm, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Wikipedia, Twitter, Picassa and others (number of services is going to be increased).

After adding Headup to our FireFox we see little plus displayed next to various links on the pages, when something is interesting for us we might click on it to get links gathered by Headup, divided in several categories like people, events, places, images, music etc.

You can also see short video presenting Headup features:

-mw