Robots Using Semantic Technology To Learn
The geniuses at the Personal Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University are working to humanize the movements and behavior of a personal-assistant robot. They want their robot to learn to recognize objects all by itself, as “naturally” as humans. Semantic Web brought this news to our attention in their article, “New Robot Has Semantic Learning Capabilities.”
“A robot with this ability will be able to interact semantically with the world. It will then also be able to interact better with us because it is able to have a common semantic model of the world with us,” said Siddhartha Srinivasa, director of the lab. Many hurdles have been successfully handled, but there are always more. Srinivasa and colleagues found that adding domain knowledge to the video input nearly tripled the number of objects the robot could discover, and reduced computer processing time by a factor of 190. Next up is labeling those objects.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
The Building of Taxonomies
This interesting topic was found on 7th Space Interactive in their article, ”Communicate to vaccinate”: the development of a taxonomy of communication interventions to improve routine childhood vaccination.”
How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
Building Semantic Technology
This second robot-related story is right out of Star Trek and seems way too fictional to be true, but there are folks working on how to make an android that would look, talk, and respond like the character Dick from the 1982 novel, “We Can Build You.”
Andrew Olney, a programmer at the University of Memphis, and David Hanson, an independent roboticist, are the architects of this challenge. They are using the “Facial Action Coding System” to give the head lifelike expressions; using “Latent Semantic Analysis” to allow it to respond to questions by drawing on a vast bank of Dick’s writings and interviews; and creating polymer “Frubber” to look like skin. It is exciting and just a little frightening to see how advanced this project has become.
This very interesting information was found on The Wall Street Journal in their article, “We Can Build You.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
When To Use Semantic Technology
This interesting use, or not, of semantic technology caught my attention. Sometimes the accuracy of semantic analysis is in question and the topic in this specific situation could create even more suspicion. The students and professors at Humboldt State University avoided that by reading each of the 150,000 geo-coded tweets to produce a map revealing geographic differences in hate speech regarding, homophobia, racism, and specially challenged topics. The Guardian brought this interesting news to our attention in their article, “Mapping hate speech: homophobia and racism on twitter.”
By using humans instead of semantic analysis for this research, the researchers were able to ensure a higher level of quality and preciseness. This approach was interesting and the results equally so. Take time to look at the map. It is somewhat sobering.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
New Approach to Travel
Andrew Lacy, one of the co-founders of the mobile game Tapulous, has moved into a new market with ZapTravel, a semantic travel search engine. The premise is to take away the data entry approach and use a more texting approach, such as in “I want to go to Paris.” This very interesting news was found on Tech Crunch in their article, “From Tap To Zap: Tapulous Co-Founder Shoots For The Moon With ZapTravel, His Semantic Travel Startup.”
This different approach not only makes it seem less mechanical, it allows for a more symbiotic and flexible search. There are also plans to provide a voice search option.
An important part of any search strategy, whether it be enterprise, intranet, or Internet, is to index the content against a strong taxonomy. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ISO/ANSI/NISO compliant taxonomies to produce comprehensive results.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
Climate Data Just Became More Accessible
The White House administration has launched a new online tool to educate and increase awareness into links between climate change and health. The interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program recently unveiled its Metadata Access Tool for Climate and Health (MATCH) platform. This interesting news was found on E2 Wire, The Hill’s Energy & Environment Blog in their post titled, “Obama officials roll out climate and health data tool.”
This digital platform is accessible to the public, with over 9,000 health, environment, and climate science sources of data to search and find.
MATCH can aid in making information available to researchers, scientists, and the public alike, to aid in research, inform, and educate.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
The Clues We Follow
Implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system can be challenging. Many factors pose hurdles of varying degrees: asset ingestion, building the database, relevant and descriptive metadata, to name a few. It is key to make the assets descriptive enough to make them worth the time to search and find them. Image & Data Manager brought this information to our attention in their article, “Designing a Controlled Vocabulary for DAM.”
There is no limit as to the criteria by which we organize data. Your descriptors can include genre, subject, identify visual clues, geographic and time spatial clues, as well as synonyms. Search results can be enhanced by the clues we leave on the data.
Another tool that enhances your search experience is a taxonomy. A strong standards-based taxonomy is one with true integrity. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
Protecting the Data
Confidentiality of data is always a concern. With the prevalence of the web, it only becomes more of a challenge to keep your data secure. Recently in Australia, this topic was addressed in parliament after an inquiry into why hundreds of highly sensitive Fitzgerald inquiry documents, including those detailing historic investigations into some high-profile Queenslanders, had been accidentally made available to the public. In addition, thousands of others had been inadvertently shredded.
State archivist Janet Prowse told the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee that the metadata – an online index containing detailed descriptions of the inquiry documents, including surveillance reports and operation targets – was easily found. “A researcher with basic web searching skills would be able to find and locate metadata,” Ms. Prowse said.
This intriguing information was brought to our attention by The Australian News in their article, “Sensitive information from Fitzgerald Inquiry available to anyone with basic web skills, hearing told.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
New Enhancements Unveiled
Colectica has released their latest enhancement to the data documentation software – Colectica 4.1. Their software is based on open standards metadata from the Data Documentation Initiative and builds on previous versions. This interesting news was brought to our attention on Digital Journal in their article, “Colectica Unveils New Version of Data Documentation Software Using Open Standards Metadata.”
Colectica 4.1 is available now for both software evaluation and to current customers. Colectica offers several software tools: Colectica Designer, Colectica Repository, and Colectica Portal. All of these use open standards to allow for interoperability with other tools.
One of the greatest advantages in contributing to open source is the ability to collaborate with a diverse, enthusiastic community.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
Metadata and Social Search
Digitalsmiths provides the technology to determine what’s happening in a video moment by moment. This capability can then be used by cable operators or streaming video providers to offer personalized recommendations to viewers. They have added to that experience by offering social recommendations to their product offering. This creates a more dynamic way for users to search and discover videos from those providers. Gigaom brought this news to our attention in their article, “Digitalsmiths adds social search and recommendations.”
By providing time-based metadata, the users are able to know moment-by-moment and scene-by-scene what’s happening, which actors are on screen, and so forth. Adding social media to the metadata tracking creates a unique opportunity for users to use the data to its fullest advantage.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.