Radar Networks

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense (from NYTimes)

Web2.0という言葉はO'riellyがわかりやすく規定したけれど現在Web3.0という言葉は色々な人が勝手に色々しゃべっていてやれユビキタスだ、やれセマンティックウェブだと騒がしくなっている。

さて、NYTimesの記事。

Web 2.0はアプリケーションをシームレスにつなぎ、マッシュアップをしていくと。
Web3.0はコンテクストを検索したらコンテクストが返ってくると。

で、Radar Networks。

 exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers.

そういえばインタースコープが「やや好き」とか「少し好き」とか「普通に好き」とかの違いを研究していたなあ。

Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

ほほーう。

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.