ACM TechNews

XML Retrieval and the Mind-Reading Machines

Information Today (08/08) Vol. 25, No. 7, P. 20; Hawkins, Donald T.

Charles Clarke of Ontario's University of Waterloo says that his primary concentration has been documents and how their structure and content is represented rather than specific XML technology. "I am more interested in information access, and XML is really the tool that has become a common language for expressing this interesting and rich structure, metadata, and content, which I think is the real focus of the document," he says. Clarke says that the basic concept of XML for marking up documents with tags and expressing data in a structured manner will endure for quite a while. He says that his ideal vision of a retrieval mechanism is something that retrieves only the part of the document he needs rather than the entire document. Clarke also mentions the need for a precise query language that allows users to particularize the right document portion. He refers to Google's progress in developing a "mind-reading" Web search engine, noting that "for many queries, the algorithms are trying effectively to understand what you really mean and give that to you. Or they may make a good guess at what you probably mean, based on the aggregate behavior of millions of people."

http://www.infotoday.com/it/itnew.htm

---

© Copyright 2008 Information, Inc. This service may be reproduced for internal distribution.