"How Universities' Intelligent Web Project Unlocks the Information That Really Counts"
Computer Weekly (03/29/05); Kavanagh, John
In his annual BCS and Royal Signals Institution lecture, Southampton University School of Electronics and Computer Science professor Nigel Shadbolt discussed intelligent Web searches that would produce incredibly accurate results through their understanding of Web page contents and their relevance to the user. "The huge growth of the Web and the massive advances in technology mean that computing brute force can deliver so much content so quickly that there is not enough human processing power to go through it in detail," he explained. "We are starting to see a requirement for our machines to know enough about structural descriptions to make the first cut of what we might be interested in, instead of giving all of it." The vehicle for intelligent searches is a "semantic Web" that enables computers to infer context through the use of metadata tags that describe the content's meaning and its relationship to other objects. Shadbolt is coordinating a six-year, multi-university research effort to make intelligent Web search practical, with a budget of 8.8 million pounds. Southampton University has developed a Web service for classifying computer science documents trained on 300,000 papers from a digital library, using the library's classification scheme, the authors' and editors' classifications, and machine learning and statistical analysis. Sheffield University is at work on a service for analyzing any Web page and applying the metadata to objects of interest, while Shadbolt said another area of concentration is the storage and retrieval of the reams of metadata, along with the concept of an information lifecycle that spans generation, usage, publication, maintenance, and decommissioning. Thus far the use of the semantic Web has been limited to military and scientific applications by specialist communities, which illustrates the need for consensus of terminology to facilitate effective search and results presentation.
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