Breakfast Links 08.01.2009

* TrustYou – make a good choice

I just stumbled upon a press release from TrustYou, a search engine for hotel and restaurant recommendations. TrustYou calls itself a semantic meta search engine. Meta because it makes use of various existing hotel recommendation platforms like HRS, hotel.de and more. Semantic because of its pre-processing methods for heterogeneous text data about hotels/restaurant and user comments. Yeah, finally a new alternaitve search engine from germany, chapeau!

See also this post: TrustYou durchsucht Hotel-Bewertungen (german)

* Google Semantics Surfacing

Stephen Arnold’s response to the article “Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?” from readwriteweb.com.

Breakfast Links 17.11.2008

* First public release of U-Compare system

I just received a message through the UIMA mailing list about the release of U-Compare. U-Compare is a text mining/NLP software (Java Web Start) which is based upon a library of ready-to-use UIMA components. It allows you the creation of complex workflows, import of custom components and the output of generated data. Exciting, since UIMA applications are still rare!

* Webinar: Open Standards and Semantic Technology

Finally some news from good old germany about the SMILA project!

Breakfast Links 27.10.2008

* Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009

Gartner analysts presented the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 and the next three years on the Symposium/ITxpo last week. Beside Virtualization and Cloud Computing they also identified Web-Oriented Architectures and with it EnterpriseMashups as growing technologies. After mashups for the web were growing and industries offered a lot of tools to make that happen (they aimed to end-consumers), EnterpriseMashups are going to offer enterprise-class style mashups for the enterprise to use. But who am I still missing? Where is SOA in this picture?

* Grant Ingersoll and Charlotte JUG on Search & Analysis

Grant Ingersoll (Lucene) held a presentation at the Charlotte JUG on Text Analysis and Search with Java-based Open Source Tools, you can find the presentation slide here.

* An Overview of Semantic Technologies at Dow Jones

A brief overview on how semantic technologies are used inside Dow Jones and their customers.

Breakfast Links 23.09.2008

* Calais (a Thomson Reuters initiative) provides a semantic blog-post plugin for Wordpress

* A short VideoSurf review from Beyond Search

Linguistic Agents released a Press Release about RoboCrunch you can read here. Beside a really short introduction to RoboCrunch, the most interesting part about the Press Release was the following sentence:

“Just try typing “I’m looking for more information about France” in RoboCrunch and in any one of other Search Engines”, says Sasson Margaliot, Founder and CEO of Linguistic Agents, “in any search engine – semantic or regular, old or new”.

I really appreciated this “task”, because with this hint they made it really interesting to check out the search results from RoboCrunch and Google, Yahoo, MSN and co. (+1)

Following the task to compare search engines with RoboCrunch I immediatley went to www.robocrunch.com, but instead of new ways on how to present a search interface I saw an experimental really plain search interface. (-1)

RoboCrunch, really plain search interface

After typing the human written search query “I’m looking for more information about France” I got a nice search result full of travel and general information on France. Absolutely what I expected. (+1)

Nice search result, again really plain visualization

Put the same question into Google and … what do you think what I got? As I expected, a lot of sites containing the phrase “I’m looking for more information”, and the term “france”. Not even one information about France! (-1 for google, +1 for RoboCrunch)

Search result on Google, not even one relevant hit

Nice demonstration! But if you think about it, do you think this example is really comparable? In my opinion, no! Google is based and specialized on term queries, RoboCrunch tries to adress the processing of phrase queries. If you’re speaking in the right Google language you will get a proper result, try it.

I’m going to check some more queries out later and present the result to you tommorrow!

Breakfast Links 21.08.2008

New semantic search engine RoboCrunch rolled out by Linguistic Agents
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release-rss/robocrunchcom-new-semantic-search-unveiled-61433.php

Breakfast Links 20.08.2008

Search Engine Optimization Meets Semantic Search
http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/08/19/when-search-engine-optimization-meets-semantic-search/

Brand Protection using Competitive Intelligence
http://searchengineland.com/080818-110907.php

High Performance HTTP Framework, Simple 4.0 released
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50394

Yahoo is now grouping results, Google tests sorting results by date
http://searchengineland.com/080819-123253.php

Breakfast Links 19.08.2008

Jitterbit, Connection applications, data and systems
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/18/jitterbit-the-open-source-project-that-bridges-data-gaps/

Hadoop Meet up in Berlin
http://blog.suma-ev.de/node/79

OASIS UIMA Standard Draft out for Public Review
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200808/msg00003.html

Transinsight: Bio-Science Search
http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/08/17/transinsight-bio-science-search/