Better Search With Structured Knowledge

Michel Dumontier, PhD

Current search engines use keywordsYou might get 104M pages backYou can only look at one page at a time.Hard to aggregate and visualize resultsHow can we ask more complicated questions, and get real answers?

Structured Knowledge

Knowledge Repositories

PowerfulInterfaces Semantic Web

FreeBaseParallax

Parallax

PowerfulInterfaces

Parallax

Key FeaturesSearch w/auto-completion (with # articles)Filters on attributes (with # articles)Connections to linked topics (with # articles)Build and customize your own visual report (map, timeline, 1D/2D charts)Share with friends!http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/

Parallax

BenefitsHelp users formulate advanced queries and find more stuffEngage users longerEmbedding visualizations built on interesting queries

Disadvantages?

Knowledge Repositories

FreeBase

FreeBase

User extensible

attributestype

Semantic Web

Semantic Web

A new web standard brought to you by the people who gave you HTML!Web 3.0 … and beyond

RDF & the Holy Triple

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subject predicate object

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Decentralized

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bob

Mary says

Ottawalives in

bob

Sally says

Carleton University

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Roger says

Data Integration

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bob Ottawalives in

cookiesCarleton University

Key ConceptsStructured knowledge leads to better search and more accurate information retrieval over sets of related dataBest knowledge repositories will be user-extensible, but leverage form fillable fields as defined by typesThe W3C’s Semantic Web will make sure that info doesn’t have to be centralized!

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Conflicting info and TRUST

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bob

Mary says

Cookieshates

bob

Emily says