i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

For a better look, visit: http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2009/05/11/hierarchy-of-beards/beardarchy...

First and foremost, watch the video before reading my blog. It's only three minutes long, and I think it's really lovely. Also, the way you watch it changes if you're not watching it naively. 

If you have the time, the entire hour-long "Words" episode, is really interesting and relevant to some things we've been talking about in class.

Published Monday, the NYT wrote about the Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL). This article touches upon many topics from recent lectures!

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.

The methodical creation -- and subsequent illustration  -- of taxonomies can provide critical insight and analysis into both organizational and evolutionary qualities of a data set. Rap names lend themselves particularly well to taxonomical examination. Influenced by both strong community bonds (The Wu Tang Clan being the most prominent example) as well as fervent competition among peers, naming conventions in rap have further beneffitted from decades of rapid artistic evolution and cultural influence.

Taking us back to the old ways of gathering information, web search companies are now tapping the power of immediate social circles instead of social networks to suggest answers to any question we might have. With virtually endless information available to us on the internet, companies have been trying to hone in on how best to present us with information that interests us, and how to make money from it.

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.

New York Times (NYT) published a very interesting article asking the question about the potential future of the social objects. (In case you don’t know what social objects are, here is the article called “Social Objects for Beginners”.) In brief, social objects are essentially the physical objects which embody social stories or social data.