October 8, 2010 – IE as in Information Extraction, not the other one, is defined in the book Semantic Web Technologies: Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems. John Davies, Rudi Studer, and Paul Warren define this type of IE as “a technology based on analyzing natural language in order to extract snippets of information.”
Contrast IE against basic information retrieval (IR). IR finds relevant text and returns a simple list. While this is useful, IR forces the user to determine the most relevant piece(s). IE automatically does this analysis for the end user; it only returns the most germane results and, most important, in a superior format.
This interesting post, titled “The Semantic Web and Complementary Technologies,” was found on Smart Data Collective. The author believes “information extraction trumps information retrieval” in the Web 3.0 world. What do you think?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
