Does orange mean a fruit or a color? The word ‘bass’ could be a tasty fish or a rocking musical instrument. When it comes to the written word, people enjoy a vast advantage over a computer, as we easily pull the context out of the text to understand the meaning of the word.

Yahoo Search wants to enable such semantic recognition in their engine. Despite the much-discussed travails on the advertising side, the tech side of Yahoo Search seems a livelier place, especially with the recent unveiling of BOSS, their opening of the index to all developers.

Impediments lay in the roadway to better semantic search. Yahoo’s Peter Mika listed an assortment of them at Devx:

It is almost impossible to return search results that relate to the secondary sense of a term

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-geeks-out-over-semantic-search-2008-07/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/reuters-opencalais-seeks-wordpress-plugin-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/reuters-opencalais-seeks-wordpress-plugin-2008-01#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:16:21 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43724 The project has a $5,000 bounty offered for the developer who creates a plugin for tagging posts with semantic infrmation.

Through the Calais project, Reuters offered a reward for the developer who creates a plugin or application for WordPress that accomplishes the following:

1. Offer automatic blog content scanning
2. Support rich meta-tagging
3. Create and maintain a Semantic tag cloud for each blogger to post
4. Embed the related Calais URI

The benefit for doing this, Tom Tague of Reuters-owned ClearForest told WebProNews, will be to fulfill the promise of a semantic web. The company has been working on that idea for a decade, almost as long as the hypertext Web has existed.

Through meta-tagging, one turns a blob of text into knowledge. All kinds of relationships that would be inobvious to a conventional search engine become apparent in semantic search.

By using Calais, people can send the metadata for their content through an API. That information gets stored, and Calais returns a unique RDF identifier that can be used by others to retrieve the same content later.

Calais will suggest tags, in real time, based on data submitted to it. Handling an uptick in usage should not be a problem, as Tague said the system can scale to millions of transactions.

Ultimately the promise of Calais could mean a web that understands relationships as well as keywords. Looking for the CEO of a company could return all kinds of connections, from public appearances to rumors to outside activities that have been recorded online.

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