Information and Knowledge

Does Information mean Knowledge or vice-versa? This is often the topic of discussion when I happen to talk about knowledge and its role in Semantic Web. More often than not we confuse information with knowledge.

So what is information? It is the smallest detail we have (fact in the system) about an entity. Today is Monday is an information, But Monday is first day of work week is not. In western countries first day of week is Monday but that is not true for middle-east, their week begins on Sunday.

So how do we define knowledge? Knowledge is the interpretation of information. In our previous example, Monday is the first day of the week or not depends in which country's context we are discussing Monday. We can define knowledge as Information related to a context. If not attached to a context, the information does not convey any meaning and that means the information is of no use hence cannot be classified as knowledge. So for an information to be classified as knowledge we must have the context attached to it.

Until Next Time...!!!

What is Semantic Search

If I ask this question in a group of 10 researchers, I will have 11 correct answers of this (including one of mine) for sure. But the question will remain unanswered as what exactly is "Semantic Search"?

During Semantic Technology Conference 2009, this topic was debated among search biggies as what exactly is next direction of search ? One thing that came out of the discussion is page ranking and keyword search is definitely NOT the way the searches are going to work in future. One of the most probable future for search engine is "It will be more like a conversation with the user".

Currently the search engine work in "Tell and show the result" mode. The user enters the keyword and the search engine dumps all possible matches (based on page rank, keyword matches etc) to the user. Most of the time the results do not make any relavance to the search intention at all. A conversation style of search seems to be more appropriate where the user refines their search criteria with continuous interaction with computer. This resembles more of how we search information in our day-to-day life. The search session will be more like a brainstorming where the user will feed more and more information about what they know about what they want. The system will then return a set of most relavant searches to the user. The user then will add more details of what they want and the steps will be repeated till the user finds what they want. At any point in time, they would also like to go back and start from scratch.

One of the positive step in this area is Semanti search engine. This search engine provides a list of suggested categories where a particular keyword is associated. This is just the starting point for semantic search. The semantic search engine should be able to let the user feed more (unlimited) details of what they know about what they are looking for. These details (provided by user) could be directly related to the result they are looking for or it might not describe the result at all. Knowledge reasoning is a major influencer in the search process. Reasoning is the core of the semantic search process and will determine how accurate the search engine is. While the search engine is designed for accuracy, the efficiency will have to be compromised at least for a while. One of the possible scenario these search engines will have to handle is percentage accuracy of result based on the search criteria. The more matching result should be displayed on top of the list.

So what is your idea of Semantic Search?

Until Next Time...!!!

Search Engines

Search is the next big thing in the World Wide Web and every big player is trying their best to capture the bigger market share of the search today. Recently I had a chance to learn about Microsoft's new Search Engine Bing and came to know that the product bing is a result of M$ buying a company that was working on Semantic Search.

With my limited interaction with Bing I did not find any WOW factor with it. The accuracy of result is bit better than google search result, but still it misses out quite a few search results (what google brings back) with high level of relevance. But it promises to be a good alternative for google search.

I also tried out Wolfram Alpha's Computational Knowledge Engine. In my opinion that is not a search engine, the Wolfram Alpha is more like a knowledge engine, that brings back facts when we submit a query. I tried to ask few questions related to Biotech and other science subjects but the result were quite disappointing, as sometime it showed me the share prices of the company and sometimes it did not bring anything at all.

The search engine technology is still far from being matured and it will be sometime before we see a fully matured search engine that can answer most of our queries. We need a true semantic search if we want to build a search engine that is helpful to the users. In the next post I will discuss more about how a true semantic search can be achieved.

Until Next Time....!!!

Is AI a possibility

In one of my previous post I discussed whether the World is Ready for AI? Today I was reading this post with after a long time (more than 2 yrs) and asked myself this question whether we have made enough advancements in the comupting to make AI possible in near future. We have had faster computers, greater RAM and storage available on our laptops over last two years but we are still far from having the computing framework that can support AI.

The basic of computing is a bit that has two states 0 and 1. What it translates to is the computer always has a state of certainty ie whether it has something or it does not have. On a contrary our normal intelligence works on few more states. We operate on 3 states.

1. We know that we know.
2. We know that we don't know
3. We don't know that we don't know.

This third state of ours is what makes us intelligent and gives us the power to reason given a situation. Human intelligence operates mostly out of this 3rd state of mind. The moment we know about anything that falls in 3rd stage it moves to either 1st or 2nd category.

Our brain operates in a 3-dimensional space and that's what provides us the flexibility to process similar data differently. But on the contrary computers operate in a linear space and that limits the processing capability of the computers. A simple example is for computer a glass of water is a glass of water no matter how many times we feed this data in, but for humans the first glass of water is life saver (if we are thirsty) but the same is not true with the 30th glass of water if it is drunk in succession. The 30th glass may become a burden to drink. So the same data is interpreted differently here in case of humans.

What we may require is to think about the fundamental aspect on which our computing is based at. The basis of computing is 0 and 1, but we may need to think about a state where the computer can be in May Be state ie somewhere in transition. Once we have this third bit discovered and our machines are based on that, we may be able to feed consciousness and that will lead to natural intelligence in computer.

Until Next Time.

Object Structures and Descriptions

While reasoning an object we often fall into a trap of thinking about the attributes and methods of the object (in a typical Object Oriented way). But reasoning about an object goes beyond the attributes and methods. While reasoning an object we need to consider the following:

1. Object fall into categories. eg. My car is a Hatchback. My Pet is doberman. etc But then we also have instances where an object is part of multiple categories like I am an Employee, Blogger and a Husband.
2. Categories can be more general or more specific in nature eg. Physician and Surgeons are types of Doctors, A Father is a parent etc.
3. In addition to generalization being common for categories with simple names, it is also natural for those with more complex description. A Contract employee is an employee. A family with at least one child is not childless etc.
4. Object have parts and these parts have multiplicity of 1 or more. Books have Title, Humans have 2 arms, Cars have 4 wheels etc.
5. The relationship among an object's parts is essential to its being considered a member of the category. A pile of book is not same as catalog of book.
   

These are few things we need consider while deriving a framework for knowledge representation. Then there are additional complexities added to it as if the same word is used as noun or pronoun. He is Helium or He refers to another person depends on the context where the word is used.

Until Next Time....