What such a researcher needs is not another search engine, but something beyond that—an analysis engine that can sniff out its own clues about a document’s meaning and then provide insight into what the search results mean in aggregate. And that’s just what IBM is about to deliver...
Once documents have been annotated in the main cluster, another series of specialized machines go to work, using clues such as how Web pages link to one another (similar to the technique Google uses to determine relevance rankings for its search results) to gain additional insight into the significance of a document. The documents are then handed off to another cluster that performs high-level analyses. Because the data has been converted from an unstructured format to a structured XML-based format, IBM and its partners can fall back on the data-mining experience and methodologies already developed for analyzing databases. The structured format also provides an easy target for developing new analytic tools.
By creating an open commercial platform for content providers and data miners, it will foster rapid innovation and commercialization in the realm of machine understanding, currently dominated by isolated research projects. This would herald a sea change in our ability to use computers to generate insight and understanding that directly affect the bottom lines of businesses, something that is unfortunately all too rare with current IT systems.
posted by Jen @ 8:33 AM
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