Researches from the Search Computing project attended the 2011 ACM SIGMOD Conference, which took place in Athens (Greece) on June 12-16.
A novel, live demonstration of the SeCo Execution Engine and Workbench environment has been presented at a dedicated booth.
DEMONSTRATION
Search Computing: Multi-domain Search on Ranked Data, authored by Alessandro Bozzon, Daniele Braga, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Francesco Corcoglioniti, Piero Fraternali, Salvatore Vadacca
Researches from the Search Computing project attended the 2oth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011) which took place in Hyderabad (India) from March 28th to April 1st.
A novel, live demonstration of the Liquid Query search interaction paradigm has been presented at a dedicated booth.
DEMONSTRATION
Exploratory search in multi-domain information spaces with Liquid Query, authored by Alessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Piero Fraternali, and Salvatore Vadacca.
Do you want to make sense of messy data? Google Refine may prove to be the right tool! It allows for cleaning up messy data, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
It takes only 8 minutes to watch the following introductory video!
Do you want to learn more? The next video explains how to transform a wikipage like this into a table by isolating rows of text using a filter and transforming them in one shot using a command.
If you still have time to spent in learning about Google Refine, you may watch the following video. It explains how to augment a dataset with external data. In particular, it shows
Endeca is a US company based in Cambridge, Mass., with operations in North America, Europe, and Asia. Its products portfolio includes a Data Integration and Enrichment platform featuring several interesting data integration functions.
Endeca provides data integration and enrichment capabilities to help you efficiently combine information from any source into a single integrated view and add value on top of the raw data. Our approach to integrating and enriching source data includes the Endeca Content Acquisition System (CAS), an out-of-the-box data integration tool designed for extracting and enhancing both unstructured and structured data, as well as integration points with ETL packages such as Informatica PowerCenter.
Noteworthily, Endeca’s data integration platform shares the same application class space as Search Computing, a fact supported by the the following additional functionality:
Endeca supports the use of joins which allows information from different sources to be combined by any shared attributes across all records. Join support also enables multiple branches of work to converge as appropriate rather than subjecting every record to every possible processing step.
Endeca is recognized as a pioneer of faceted search, particularly in the context of electronic commerce[2] and online libraries[3]. It claims that over 600 customers, including manufacturers, ecommerce sites, media sites, and U.S. intelligence services, are using its Information Access Platform product.
[Source Wikipedia]
[Website www.endeca.com]
Researches from the Search Computing project attended the 8th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing, which took place in San Francisco from December 7 to December 10 2010.
Two works related to Search Computing were presented: a demonstration of the SeCo Execution Engine, and a research paper about the SeCo architecture.
Panta Rhei: Optimized and Ranked Data Processing over Heterogeneous Sources authored by Daniele Braga, Francesco Corcoglioniti, Michael Grossniklaus and Salvatore Vadacca.
Salvatore Vadacca presenting the SeCo demonstration
In the era of digital information, the value of data resides not only in its volume and quality, but also in the additional information that can be inferred from the combination (aggregation, comparison and join) of such data. There is a concrete need for data processing solutions that combine distributed and heterogeneous data sources, such as Web services, relational databases, and even search engines, that can all be modeled as services. In this demonstration, we show how our Panta Rhei model addresses the challenge of processing data over heterogeneous sources to provide feasible and ranked combinations of these services.
A Service-Based Architecture for Multi-domain Search on the Web authored by Alessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, Francesco Corcoglioniti, and Salvatore Vadacca.
Mendeley started as three guys in a virtual garage in 2007 – and has grown to become the world’s largest research collaboration platform less than two years after its public launch in 2008. In 2010, Mendeley cross the barrier of 500,000 users.
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
As many other Web 2.0 applications Mendeley also has Web API. Check out Read Meter by Dario Taraborelli for a great mash-up built on them.
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…
One of the research tracks within the Search Computing project deals with Visual Interfaces and User Interaction for Search Computing. There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering data. This post lists 5 data visualization tools that we considered for our experiments and prototypal applications.
The Javascript Information Visualization Toolkit: The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web. JIT supports multiple data representations (Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, etc), it works in the most recent versions of major browsers (IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+ ). JIT is licensed under the BSD License.
Stanford Protovis: Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations. Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example.
Flare: Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license.
Processing.js: Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games. Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer until Mircosoft catch up with ISSUE 15.copy right note: The content of this post has been cut and pasted from the respective technologies’ Web sites, to increase their awarness.
Fast Search & Transfer ASA (recursive acronym FAST) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.
On April 24, 2008, Microsoft closed its acquisition of FAST. FAST is now known as FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.
FAST offers an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offers a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company is developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine. FAST is notable for a major ongoing investigation by the Norwegian police into accounting fraud around the inflation of revenues and profits which has led to police raids on its offices.
[Source Wikipedia ]
[Website http://www.fastsearch.com/]
ChaCha is a mobile answering service which uses a technique known as social searching (a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users).
[Website http://www.chacha.com/]
