i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As someone who has formal training in graphic design and experience working in the field with an eclectic mix of clients, I strongly believe in the importance of content, structure AND presentation. While I agree that there are times when presentation gets in the way of being able to understand the content, I have seen cases where the opposite is also true, and I believe that they must work together in order to communicate effectively and assist in information retrieval. 

Language Understanding has been studied for years. But so far, progresses are only made within a limited domain (think of controlled vocabulary).

In this article, researchers at CMU, Google and Yahoo come together ambitiously trying to build up an ontology space that could capture language meanings based on contents from billions of webpages.

One interesting service that provides an ontology for common things is Freebase (which is now part of Google). You can look for a concept/person/place and Freebase will tell you different domains in which the concept is used. For example, if you look for Berkeley, you can refine your search for Berkeley (USA), Berkeley (UK), or Berkeley (University). You can go crazy and see that all the information that Freebase has about Berkeley is available as an RDF file.

This blog entry is an example of cultural categorization systems and how embodied language and culture can cause conflicts.

My extended family owns rice noodle factories in San Francisco that serve many of the Asian restaurants.  For the past year they have been having to deal with a new law that has put their noodle factories in jeopardy.   The reasons for this conflict stem from cultural categorization issues. 

Marc Hedlund, co-founder of Wesabe, recently wrote a blog post offering insight into why Wesabe failed and its competitor, Mint, succeeded. The two web applications, which launched within a year of each other, both aimed to help users manage their personal finances. While Wesabe enabled users to tag stores and transactions and took a more community-oriented approach, Mint automatically categorizes information as it is imported from various financial institutions.

A Contextual Discovery Engine is a search which does a context sensitive searches so that even the information which is present in unstructured data can be retrieved. This not only searches for terms which are similar in the syntax and meaning but it will also search for everything that has been used in a similar context. It will then group the searches by the context.

To take an example from the website of such a search engine www.sophiasearch.com, Java can stand for

Guy Deutscher writes an interesting article asking "how our mother tongue really shapes our experience of the world". He inquires about categories in the most abstract sense, by exploring whether our mother tongues "oblige" us to think in a certain way because of the constraints of the mother tongue itself.

"Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac"

According to the article, Andrew Taylor worked on creating speech recognition software for the Mac for 10 years while his competitor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, made their own version.  In February of 2010 Dragon, now Nuance, bought Andrew's company and gave his team access to all of the company's dictation-software expertise, marketing power and other resources.

(just cutting and pasting here for people who enjoyed Kimra's talk about metadata for video on 9/27)

The explosion of the mobile device market demonstrates how consumers have come to expect and rely on access to the network from anywhere, at any time. Increasingly, people expect similar access to the Web from consumer electronics such as televisions. W3C has begun to organize a series of workshops to discuss this convergence with television industry and other producers of consumer electronics.

Different words means different  things to different people! According to this article, thieves in Georgia keep stealing 3 street signs: Green Acres, Boone's Farm and Mary Jane Lane. Apparently these thieves attribute some meaning to these signs. Perhaps it reminds them of their favorite activities and products?  I, personally, never watched Green Acres or sipped on some fine Boone wine. And the name Mary Jane reminds me of Spider Man, not marijuana.