[ann] Squiggle Ski - A semantic search engine for finding images of Alpine Ski Athletes

                         Squiggle Ski
               ------------------------------------ 
                    A semantic search engine 
                       for finding images 
                    of Alpine Ski Athletes
                http://squiggle.cefriel.it/ski 


On behalf of CEFRIEL's Semantic Web Activity group [1], we are proud to
announce the first public release Squiggle Ski: a semantic search engine
for finding images of Alpine Ski Athletes powered by CEFRIEL's semantic
search engine Squiggle [2][3].

Squiggle Ski
------------
CEFRIEL is Official Supplier of Applied Academic Research of Torino 2006
Olympic Winter Games. We have the opportunity to demonstrate Squiggle in
the context of the CEFRIEL's activities related to the Winter Olympic
Games [4].

A simple way to understand the power of the service offered by Squiggle
Ski is searching for "libera" which is the Italian word for the Alpine
Ski "downhill" discipline. Only 33 results are retuned, but if you click
on the "downhill" link in the "did you mean..." box, you got 515 hits
and the explanation of the results [5]. Another try can be searching for
"Herminator": Squiggle will recognize it to be a nickname of Hermann
Maier [6].  

The site is continuously updated with new images, even from Torino 2006.

Squiggle
--------
Squiggle is a framework that supports the building of a domain-aware
semantic search engine. Squiggle represents an abstraction for people
who want to build a semantic search engine in a particular domain and do
not want to deal with low-level indexing and storing processes.

Squiggle seamlessly combines the speed of syntactic search tools with
improved recall and precision of Semantic Web technologies. This is
because Squiggle is able to trace any
alternative/multilingual/misspelled labels back to the corresponding
concepts, i.e. Squiggle can identify and recognize meanings.

Among the constituents of Squiggle, Sesame is used as repository and
inference support for answering the queries on the knowledge base,
described in RDF with regards to the SKOS model, whereas the syntactic
search engine Lucene is used, among other things, to quickly perform
text searches in literals.

The Squiggle framework is domain independent and can thus be
instantiated with and adapted to any domain specific context and
ontology.

For more information, please visit http://squiggle.cefriel.it 

Kindly regards,

Emanuele Della Valle, Irene Celino, Dario Cerizza

[1] http://swa.cefriel.it 
[2] http://squiggle.cefriel.it 
[3] http://www.cefriel.it/ricerca/progetti/squiggle.html?lang=en  
[4] http://www.cefriel.it/press/olimpiadi2006.html?lang=en 
[5] http://squiggle.cefriel.it/ski/preview.jsp?search=libera 
[6] http://squiggle.cefriel.it/ski/preview.jsp?search=herminator 

--
Semantic Web Activities
CEFRIEL - Politecnico di Milano
Via Fucini, 2 * 20133 Milano (Italy)
p. +39 0223954324 e. semanticweb@cefriel.it 
f. +39 0223954524 w. http://swa.cefriel.it   

Received on Friday, 17 February 2006 18:20:38 UTC