A Short History of Thesauri

We know of one Sanskrit thesaurus, the Amarakosha (Treasury or Dictionary of Amara), written by Buddhist scholar Amara Simha around 375 or 400 AD. Interestingly, it was written in verse. (The only other terminology in verse I can think of offhand is the one-L lama one by Ogden Nash, but I don’t think that bears comparison to the Amarakosha.)

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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.

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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, i.e., “I want to go to Paris.”

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Recycling Treasures

Once again my search for the odd and illusive taxonomies have resulted in a treasure. “Taxonomy of trash” was brought to us by Philly.com and it didn’t fail to entertain and intrigue me.

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The Power of Social Media

The Disaster 2.0 team recently hosted the second Masterclass at the Federation of Enterprises in Belgium to discuss the role of social media and web technologies in providing information during disasters. Disaster 2.0 is a two-year project exploring how EU governments currently and can potentially use web 2.0 applications and semantic technologies in disaster response.

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