RE: A Simple Analogy

: From: Danny Ayers :
:
: Sorry - Erdos numbers?

It's a reputation system of sorts:

<http://www.oakland.edu/~grossman/readme.html>


: I strongly agree here - the ability to get an effective answer from a query
: to newsgroup archives etc. would be a major global time-saver. I've heard it
: argued that this is already possible if you know how to word your query
: properly - nah. But if your first vague query was answered with a choice of
: routes to go down ('Ask Jeeves' does something like this) and your query was
: narrowed by interaction it should work (Jeeves is rather disappointing in
: this respect). As long as there's a half decent agent looking at thoroughly
: decent metadata - oh, do hurry up, Semweb...

Well, given that WordNet is freely available and now described
(I think?) in RDF, it's feasible to refine search against it
and/or a personal term profile/graph. There has been working
on thesauri discrimination of queries for years in IR.

Refining the query may well be the easy bit. Controlling metadata
spoofing in the target data sounds really hard to me: that's one
thing the number crunching appraoch to search has in it's favour,
the potential for hybrid approaches (such graphing citations)
notwithstanding.

Sam Johnson said it best...

"I saw that one enquiry only gave
occasion to another, that book
referred to book, that to search
was not always to find, and to
find was not always to be informed."

...in 1753.

regards,
Bill de hÓra

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2001 16:00:36 UTC