Jef's web files - Topic maps

Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:54:25 -0400

IBM plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler "keyword" searches relied upon by consumer Web companies such as Google Inc., the world's largest computer company said on Monday.

While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve information, IBM is looking to transform how office workers sift through the piles of data stored inside organizations.

"I don't see any of the major players moving into this area," Arthur Ciccolo, head of search technology at IBM Research, said of how major consumer Internet search companies such as Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft have focused on the public Internet instead of private record data retrieval.

IBM plans to openly offer other software developers its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts.

"Aristotle" (The Knowledge Web)

Mon, 31 May 2004 00:20:15 -0400

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

HyperGraph

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 11:56:10 -0400

HyperGraph is an open source project which provides java code to work with hyperbolic geometry and especially with hyperbolic trees. It provides a very extensible api to visualize hyperbolic geometry, to handle graphs and to layout hyperbolic trees. As soon as you want to look at large data volume that has a hierarchical structure, you will find hyperbolic trees very useful - they show more data than standard tree representations like your favorite explorer, and they have a great look and feel.

Researchers develop computer application to 'read' medical literature, find significant data relationships

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:24:22 -0500

Until recently, researchers and their assistants spent countless hours poring over seemingly endless volumes of journals and scientific literature for information pertinent to their studies in fields such as cancer, AIDS, pediatrics and cardiology.

But thanks to new software developed by bioinformatics researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, scientists can now easily identify obscure commonalities in research data and directly relate them to their studies, saving money and speeding the process of discovery.

The computer application is unique because it "emulates the scientific thought process" in researching data, said Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, who with former graduate student Dr. Jonathan Wren developed the system.

A Fountain of Knowledge

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 20:04:48 -0500

The great strength of computers is that they can reliably manipulate vast amounts of data very quickly. Their great weakness is that they don’t have a clue as to what any of that data actually means.

Computer scientists have been laboring for decades to eliminate that weakness, with some limited successes in some limited domains. Now, IBM Corp. appears to have made a major breakthrough in the field of machine understanding. The results could spell big business not just for IBM but for data miners, content providers, retailers, political consultants, market analysts, and any other group that relies on information as part of its stock in trade.

IBM’s breakthrough is called WebFountain—half a football field’s worth of rack-mounted processors, routers, and disk drives running a huge menagerie of programs. All this hardware and software is dedicated to one purpose: making sense of the churning ocean of information, opinion, and falsehood that roils the Internet every second of every day.

Intertwingularity

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 13:02:53 -0500

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
- Ted Nelson

Big Idea, Bad Idea

Fri, 20 Dec 2002 09:06:13 -0500

Is it possible to catalogue every human idea? Japan-based researcher Darryl Macer thinks so, and last month he proposed in the journal Nature to count the number of human ideas and map them. This plan, while a clever attention grabber, will not succeed and demonstrates a worrisome mode of thinking.

Macer, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, writes that "although the human mind appears to be infinitely complex ... I would propose that the number of ideas that human beings have is finite, and call for a project to map the ideas of the human mind."

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Sun, 30 May 2004 14:23:04 -0400

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter
Copyright 1979