With the advent of the Web, search has become the prominent paradigm for information seeking, both across the online space and within enterprises. Search frameworks and components can be used to build search-based applications in diverse vertical fields. However, no precise engineering methods and approaches have been devised for this class of applications.

This tutorial, offered at the 10th International Conference on Web Engineering, presents the peculiarities of advanced Web search applications, describes some tools and techniques that can be exploited, and offers a methodological approach to development. The approach proposed in this tutorial is based on the paradigm of Model Driven Development (MDD), where models are the core artifacts of the application life-cycle and model transformations progressively refine models to achieve an executable version of the system. To cope with the process-intensive nature of the main interactions (i.e., content analysis, query management, etc.), we describe the use of Process Models (e.g., BPMN models). Indeed, search-based applications are considered as process- and content-intensive applications, due to the trends towards exploratory search and search as a process visions.

Is developing mash-ups with Web 2.0 really much easier than using Semantic Web technologies? For instance, given a music style as an input, what it takes to retrieve data from online music archives (MusicBrainz, MusicBrainz D2R Server, MusicMoz) and event databases (EVDB)? What to merge them and to let the users explore the results? Are Semantic Web technologies up to this Web 2.0 challenge? This half-day tutorial shows how to realize a Semantic Web Application we named Music Event Explorer or shortly meex (try it!).

The new Search Computing Web site is online!

The Search Computing Web site is the main source of information for the Search Computing project, and it  features:

  • A brand new section dedicated to demonstrators, where you canfind several demonstration videos of the prototypes developed within the project, plus access to some live demonstrators
  • Slides, pictures and audio footage of the second Search Computing Workshop, held in Milano and Como, Italy, on May 25-31, 2010. The workshop targeted several “hot topics” of the project, with roughly 50 participants (50% invited and 50% SeCo), including Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo!, Paolo Boldi, Gabriella Pasi, Roberto Verganti, Tommaso Buganza, Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Francesco Guerra, and Domenico Beneventano, Fabian Suchanek, Georg Gottlob, Sergio Flesca, Florian Daniel, Fabio Casati, Imran Muhammad, Dana Florescu, Donald Kossmann, Norman Paton, Neoklis Polyzotis, Ihab F. Ilyas, Frank Valentin, Paolo Missier, Angela Bachi, Paolo Romano, Luciano Milanesi, Marta Corubolo, etc.
  • A whole section dedicated to the book “Search Computing Challenges and Directions”, edited by Stefano Ceri, Marco Brambilla (Springer LNCS, Vol. 5950, March 2010).
  • Theses and open positions within the project, plus a lot of additional material like the slides of the MS course on Search Computing at Politecnico di Milano, publications and so on.

Check it out at: www.search-computing.org

ACM Queue has just published an interesting survey by Jeffrey Heer, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky on advanced visualization techniques.

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Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is a Web service where users, turkers, are paid small rewards (few cents) for short computational task called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). A contractor generates the HITs, post them on Mturk and later download all the result.

TurKit is a Java/JavaScript API (developed by the User Interface Design Group at MIT) for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. As of today, TurKit represents the first example of iterative tasks framework for Mturk, as it allows users to perform incremental tasks by automatically generating HITs based on the results of previous HITs.

Many applications can benefit from this iterative paradigm: turkers can take turns improving a passage of text, verify each other’s work by voting on it or implement the comparison function of an iterative sorting algorithm. In the context of SeCo, turkers can be employed, for instance,  to evaluate the quality of a query response.

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Via O’Reilly Radar:

ToxicLibsan independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing.

The library, programmed in Java, contains something like 130+ classes devoted to computational design which, for the purposes of Search Computing, might translate into data visualization and interaction.

The library features packages for audio, color, geometries, and physic effects management. A set of demo applications is hosted on openprocessing.org.

Apple has recently announced the acquisition of Siri, an application that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

As some experts suggest (see John Battelle’s blog), Apple could be looking for a search engine for its App Store. As of April 8, 2010, there are at least 185,000 third-party applications available on the App Store.

The engine should not crawl the web and will not be a competitor of Google; it will suggests applications and services to be download/bought, according to the user interaction with the device. continue reading…

In the last few years non-relational data stores have drawn the attention of researchers and pratictioners. Their lack of fixed table schemas and the avoidance of join operators allow these tools to scale horizontally, storing huge amounts of data and providing high-performance access to it.

This class of databases (also known as NoSQL databases) often employs a distributed architecture with the data partitioned and redundantly replicated on several nodes, providing both scalability and fault tolerance.

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After presenting our Liquid Query paper at WWW 2010, we took some time to analyze the overall scientific and technical program, spotting some papers that relates a lot to some of the research problems addressed by SeCo.

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Liquid Query: Multi-domain Exploratory Search on the Web

The slides refer to our presentation at WWW 2010. Have a look to our even planner demo!

The abstract of the paper and a demonstration video follow.

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