Tuesday, April 25, 2006

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View

New Siderean Software Navigates from Bird's-Eye to Bug's-Eye View: "Seamark Navigator is location- and format-independent. "No longer are enterprise users forced to make decisions based on algorithmic results lurking behind a text box; now, users can make these decisions with confidence, knowing they have considered all the relevant content and relationships they may not have known existed."

The Seamark navigation engine uses "facets" (properties, categories, features) to guide users to relevant content. The Seamark Navigator provided faceted navigation in its earlier versions, but Petrossian noted that the key distinguishing piece of the new version is the new dynamic capabilities. Seamark Navigator 4.0 stitches metadata together on-the-fly, using RDF (resource description framework), a Semantic Web specification from the W3C (http://www.w3.org/RDF). It's flexible and doesn't require data models to be fixed, he explained. Because of this, the product can illustrate unseen relationships. Products from competitors also can bridge information silos but require "considerable coding in advance and lots of heavy-lifting proprietary technology," according to Petrossian. Seamark Navigator is also a bidirectional system, in that it allows users to contribute tags."

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Vikings Set Out to Conquer Semantic Web

Vikings set out to conquer Semantic Web: "German scientists are working on a project they call Wikinger (German for 'Viking') based on the concept of Wikipedia to provide virtual knowledge networking in addition to the classic exchange of knowledge at Congresses. The goal of the project is to create a domain-neutral platform for scientists to allow them to perform research in knowledge bases regardless of where they are and to generate new knowledge via the Internet in collaboration. The researchers are paying special attention to support for colleagues in networking new contributions with current knowledge. To this end, techniques from the Semantic Web are being used."