Search Computing Blog

Researches from the Search Computing project attended the 11th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2011) which took place in Paphos (Cyprus) on June 20-24.

Several works has been presented at the conference:

• A keynote from Stefano Ceri: The Anatomy of a Multi-Domain Search Infrastructure;
• A research paper about Multi-way rank join with parallel access;
• A live demonstration of the SeCo system.

The conference also featured a SeCo-sponsored event: the First International Workshop on Search, Exploration and Navigation of Web Data Sources (ExploreWeb 2011)

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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

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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.

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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.

Demonstration

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.

Research Paper

A Service-Based Architecture for Multi-domain Search on the Web authored by Alessandro Bozzon, Marco Brambilla, Francesco Corcoglioniti, and Salvatore Vadacca.

The Search Computing website now features 3 additional demonstration videos. The first video demonstrates the Bioinformatic search computing scenario, and it is accessible here.

The remaining 2 videos are the results of a concept design made by 3 Politecnico di Milano students ( Lorenzo Ameri, Marco La Mantia, and Simone Paoli). The application is an “Evening Planner”, and its videos are available here and here.

A screenshot of the Evening Planner demonstration video

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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As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic  value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.

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Microsoft Live Labs recently launched  Pivot, a new tool to visually explore large sets of data. Gray Flake presented it at the latest TED Talk event.

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Below you can pre-view the new look of Google. Click to enlarge

Google's new look

Read more: http://www.taranfx.com/blog/googles-new-design-with-caffeine

Do you like to try it yourself? read out how http://www.taranfx.com/blog/try-new-google-search-caffeine

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images.

[Source systemone]

[Website http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/]