Demo projects push boundaries of search
Jinfo Blog

4th October 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Sometimes innovations turn up where you don’t expect them – not as glitzy product launches from the usual commercial suspects but as demonstration projects from niche operators or academia. Here are two recent examples: a system to highlight unexpected connections between news, and what’s claimed to be the world’s first intelligent financial search engine. News Dots is developed by Slate, a web-based news analysis magazine owned by the Washington Post Company. Invoking the famous six degrees of separation that are supposed to characterise all members of the human race, it offers a daily updated visual representation of issues and people in the news, and highlights connections between them – some of them strikingly unexpected ones. It works by submitting articles from 500 publications to Thomson Reuters’ Calais system for tagging (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e4677 for background on this) – after which Slate’s own tool registers multiple tags and the connections between topics that they produce, displaying those connections visually (http://digbig.com/5bajwn). It’s still a work in progress and Slate is inviting ideas for ways of improving it; but for due diligence or risk analysis purposes, anything’s got to be better than trawling through lists, so it might just be worth keeping an eye on it. SONAR is the product of research at the Carlos III University of Madrid. It collects financial and other business data from both public and corporate information sources, adds it to a repository of semantically recorded data, and applies both an inference engine capable of performing reasoning tasks on the recorded information and a natural language processor to help the user perform the search in the simplest way possible (http://digbig.com/5bajwp). Designed for both private investors and large financial concerns, the developers say that it responds to a need to be able to analyse a large volume of information intelligently for decision making purposes. It’s a research project at this stage – no sign of any commercial joint ventures yet – so it remains to be seen whether it ever translates into a viable product. Neither of these developments is unique. Leadership Networks is another well established ‘six degrees’ visualisation (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e51) and Matthew Solle has reviewed a whole range of other data visualisation tools for FreePint’s FUMSI magazine (http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/share/3619). There are also by now plenty of semantic search applications for business; try Alacra Pulse (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22247), Newssift (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e17206) or Zubed Jobs (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21509) for instance. To be frank, neither News Dots nor SONAR is likely to set the world on fire. But it would be unwise to ignore the potential they represent.

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