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Opening metadata the key to the process

One word may have two different meanings, depending on the context of their usage. Yahoo hopes to find the key in search that enables its engine to understand the difference.

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—especially if a dominant sense exists—for example, try searching for George Bush the beer brewer as compared to the President.

When no clear key exists, search engines are unable to perform queries on descriptions of objects. For example, try searching for the author of this article with the keywords ‘semantic web researcher working for yahoo.’

Multimedia queries are also difficult to answer, as multimedia objects are typically described with only a few keywords (tagging) or sentences. This is typically too little text for the statistical methods of (Information Retrieval) to be effective.

The key to unlocking these meanings comes from the metadata associated with the information being indexed. Mika called for publishers to expose this data, and suggested the benefit would be increased traffic.

Mika's logic contends that better availability of metadata translates into better placement in search results, when the semantics of the request line up with that metadata. He suggested Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform as a place where publishers can begin the process of opening up that metadata.