infoarch

As promised I would let you know what my experiences are with Twine . Basically not much. I really took a good look at it in the beginning, but could find out how it would fit in my work. I couldn't just drop my work documents there. I stuff I do outside work doesn't fit there at all. So, in the end I didn't up using it much. I'm still listening to the Twine users and hoping to hear from them how I can integrate it in my work life. I do find that Twine could mean a lot in the enterprise. I would be wonderful to drop all my stuff in their, have Twine find interesting related documents, bookmarks and people, connect to people that work on related stuff, etc. Maybe we can try this in the near future? Two interesting posts on Twine can be found here and here .

Some time ago I posted on a tool called Context Organizer . I told you I would evaluate the tool and share my experiences with you. A commenter rightly reminded me to do that. So here goes! Actually I evaluated it a long time ago and eventually stopped doing that and even de-installed the tool. I simply had too much issues with the software and plugins. I'll bet there have been a bunch of updates. My evaluation is about the version they had around November-December 2007. Interestingly, the company selling Context Organizer (and other products) found me via LinkedIn. They said they were looking for people with a background in language technology and knowledge management. That was the first time a company approached me via LinkedIn, so I found that quite exciting. After downloading 'Context Organizer' and playing around with it for some time, I emailed them these comments: "Well, I took a look at Context Organizer this evening! In the past I've looked at auto s...

Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator . Cool and very useful! Man, we did lots of research on automatic translation in the past. Also using parallel texts/web pages. But we never had enough to get it good. Google does, of course. I also like the social part of Translate: you may suggest a better translation if you like.

As I wrote before I'm really curious to start using Twine . I'm still waiting for an invite to the beta. Nova Spivak just posted that people like me can get ahead in line by posting about Twine on their blog! Well, here's my post! Hope to get my invite soon and let you know what my experience with Twine is. And if you want an invite too, just follow the link !

I'll continue and round up my posts on "The New Semantic Web wave" . In this post I'll comment on Alex Iskold's posts about the Semantic Web on Read/WriteWeb . The first post is titled "Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach" and the second "Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web" . First of all: Alex, thanks for the insightful posts and the historical overview of the development of the semantic web. Secondly, to my readers, please read Alex's full posts. Summarizing them for you would withhold you of a good overview. They're long posts, but well worth the read. Now to my comments. I really liked the pragmatic approach ("simple semantics") to the long quest for the Semantic Web (refer to figure). I agree with your "new approach" too. Along with the examples you give, I find that Twine and Powerset are applying this new approach, right? They're doing "simple semantics", not waiting ...

Some time ago I was invited to use Powerset , a new natural language search tool! I'll share my experiences with you. The user-interface is wonderful! It’s clear, not clogged, lets you type in comments without moving away from the pa ge, etc. Here are two screenshots to give you an idea. When you start using Powerset you get to watch a couple of short video’s on how Powerset works, how you can use it, what the limitations of this version are, etc. Insightful, good expectation management. (By the way, why not let all be able to see those video's, while they're waiting for invites?) To give you a taste of how Powerset’s natural language search works they’ve created a set of queries to illustrate the power of their semantic index. The reference applications are limited to ‘speech’ (quotes), ‘business’ and ‘arts’. There's an application called Powermouse, which gives us a glimpse into Powerset’s natural language index and lets us see how it extracts struc...

Scobelizer shared this first-time demo of Twine . While waiting for an invite I'll chew on this! UPDATE Dec. 18, 2007: Just watched the video. I'm really looking forward to getting my invite. This technology would be very interesting to use in companies. I think the limited scope would make Twine even more useful. Is Radar Networks thinking about offering an enterprise-version of Twine?

Interesting interview with Nova Spivack , founder of Radar Networks , on Twine , by the Downloadsquad . Twine is about sharing, finding and organizing personal information in one place in a new way. This app addresses information overload most knowledge workers experience. ( Yes, there's money to be made here! , as Phil Windley says.) Spivack says Twine is the next step in knowledge management and communities of practice. All your personal information is tied together in one place. It's something in between Google and Facebook . Using natural language processing they can find places, people and things in your information. You can search in your Twine network for relatedness. The search is based on a user-driven crawler. Later on they will support importing all your information. Money will (possibly) be made using ads. They are slowly letting people use Twine (I'm still waiting…). Twine is about "knowledge networking" as opposed to "social networkin...

Anyway, let’s get back to the new apps. I collected all kinds of information on these tools. Lots of insightful articles have been written on them too. Here’s an overview of the posts: About Twine : Really short video about Twine. Presentation on the Semantic Web and Twine. Techcrunch review of Twine. RoughType review of Twine. O’Reilly Review of Twine. ReadWriteWeb review of Twine. About Powerset : Not too much posts about them lately. Wrote about them before here and here (and pointed to other posts on them). I’ll be posting again about Powerset soon! About TrueKnowledge : ReadWriteWeb review of TrueKnowledge Also check out this panel discussion on the Semantic Web at the Web 2.0 summit titled ‘The Semantic Edge’ with demo’s (although you can’t see them…) of Radar Networks (Twine), Powerset and Metaweb (Freebase). Metaweb kicks of with a demo of Freebase . It’s about opening up the silo’s of data. And creating interconnections between...

Some time ago I posted about an article in TR on Powerset . Mark Johnson from Powerset left a comment and pointed me to a blog post about their first demo . Data Strateg y says: It was basically a PowerPoint with some live demonstration of a few queries where Powerset got much better results than Google. (No surprises there.) Note that all the demos throughout the evening were only searching over Wikipedia. And: The interesting part of the night was the demo station where they allow people to compare search results between Powerset and Google. The queries were limited to the form of “What did ___ say?” and people were welcomed to fill in the blank with famous names. And: After each query, the user was encouraged to vote using one of the three buttons underneath the search box. He could vote that 1) Powerset results were better, 2) Google results were better, or 3) It’s a tie, and the buttons kept track of the counts. In almost all cases, the results were either a tie or Powerset ha...

TR published an article titled: "Building a Better Search Engine" . There's a lot of buzz going on around "beating Google search". Wikia is one of the names that's often mentioned. Powerset is too. (The TR article also mentions Avatar by IBM .) The TR article is disappointing due to the fact that nothing new is mentioned. All the issues in natural language technology (which is part of my educational background) and search mentioned are old (and very difficult). And progress is slow. Up until now, we haven't seen a convincing demo by, for instance , Powerset. They say on their blog they will be demo-ing soon. I know my post sounds cynical, but the fact that I write about this topic is because I really hope search will be improved by companies at Powerset, IBM, etc. Or by older Dutch companies as Irion and Collexis .