Browsing Posts published by Alessandro Bozzon

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.

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.

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.

The Open Data Protocol

This posts presents another initiative to open-up data sources by mean of standard Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON: the Open Data Protocol (OData).

OData (which seems to be mainly supported by Microsoft) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data. OData can be used to give access to a variety of sources, such as relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

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Georgi Kobilarov, the CEO of a German, Linked Data startup called Uberblic, issued an open challenge on his blog, asking: if we had a Web of Data, what would you build?

Here’s Georgi idea:

Here’s my idea: If we had a Web of Data, I would built an application for painless travel planning. It would integrate flight plans, train timetables, bus routes, car rental offers, etc. And the user would be able to just say: I want to go from A to B: Find me the best/cheapest/fastest routes.

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Today we discuss on an article published by the Search Engine Land blog, where the author is making a strong case for Search Computing.

The author says:

Business buyers use search engines throughout the entire research and buying process.

We couldn’t agree more. Next Generation Web Search will be a switch in user behavior paradigms: asRicardo Baeza-Yates and Prabhakar Raghavan state in the Search Computing: Challenges and Directions book:

… people do not really want to search, they want to get tasks done…

So, What are business buyers looking for?

…  According to a B2B survey conducted by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa, buyers are primarily looking for:

  1. Pricing information
  2. Product information
  3. Reviews and comparisons

As buyers move into the research and comparison phases, they start to formalize their needs and evaluate alternatives. Product information related to features and functionality, technical spec sheets, buyer guides and comparison charts are valuable.

An holistic view over such a variegated type of information requires machineries able to query the Web and (meaningfully) join correlated data. This is one of the goals of Search Computing, and you may enjoy a first example of our vision by trying our first demonstration application.

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