NFAIS blogging part III: Current Search Technologies

Chris Pooley, CEO of Intellidimension, presenting now. His company deals with semantic searching technology. What is semantic searching? Incorporating searcher intent and contextual meaning into the generation of search results- in general, a better incorporation of the meaning of the term, rather than its resemblance and recurrence solely as strings of characters. Little s semantics- points to search that uses powerful algorithms, human indexes, thesauri in the way that Wolfram|Alpha has pioneered. Big S semantic searching refers to semantic web open standards like RDF, OWL, and SPARQL- where the semantics are incorporated into the data and that data can be interpreted by computers and browsers, in a more automated, embedded way. They can be complementary approaches- not mutually exclusive and both have the same goal: improving search results for end-users. The more intelligence we put in the data itself, the less work the search algorithm needs to do. Pooley sees Facebook's new OpenGraph protocol as being a huge breakthrough for the semantic web-in part because it is based on RDF and it only requires a few additional lines of code to be able to harvest recommendations that are personalized, local, and relevant.