As technologies develop to find more precise answers to people’s questions by advancing structured data techniques, queries and knowledge bases, the underlying question of how the retrieved information is catalyzed may still remain unanswered.  The impact of these technologies lies in the value of generating knowledge from the information given in answer to a question.  But certain questions remain: Will the answers generated be precise enough? Is the information presented well enough to create tangible and valuable knowledge to the benefit of the user?

Structured data generators can already create tangible knowledge in a business setting, allowing a company to function more effectively.  An Ontario-based startup, Open Text, provides such enterprise content management technologies to businesses.  Businesses use this and similar technologies to organize and manage their information.  The technologies provided by Open Text help to convert this information to knowledge through tight organization and ease of accessibility. 

C. Lee Giles a professor of information sciences and technology at Pennsylvania State University suggests that search engines may someday be completely individualized. Users will design their own directories based on their own personal needs and interests. “Already, you can download the software to build your own small engine,” Giles highlights.  A more practical solution, at least in the short term, is what Giles calls the niche search engine, designed specifically to meet the needs of a group of people with similar interests: employees of a company or members of a profession, for example. By limiting its crawling to a specific subject area, the niche engine can burrow deeper, providing more consistently useful information.

A prime example is CiteSeer, a tool that Giles and colleague, Steve Lawrence created for the field of computer and information science. CiteSeer crawls the growing body of computer-science literature available on the web and ignores everything else. Because the amount of information it finds relevant is relatively small, it can offer users important features that generic engines can’t. In addition to allowing for keyword search, for example, CiteSeer indexes all its documents by citation. It even provides the context of each citation for easy reference, as well as links to citing documents, authors, and institutions. “It can help users see how important a given article has been within the field, and show the relationships between ideas,” Giles says. CiteSeer also allows users to submit links and content updates, making it more current and accurate than generic engines. It can do all these things automatically, Giles says, because its searches are strictly limited — to one subject area, but also to a single, standardized type of document: the scientific paper. Within its specialized realm, CiteSeer has proved itself tremendously useful. The engine now catalogs some 500,000 papers, and adds 10,000 more every month, Giles says. It receives over 100,000 visits per day. As another measure of its perceived value, a significant portion of the papers it now indexes are not found and retrieved by its crawler but are submitted by its users.

CiteSeer’s success has inspired Giles to build similar tools for other “domains.” Early this year, he unveiled eBizSearch, a niche engine for practitioners and students of e-business, built on the same software platform that powers CiteSeer. “The same thing can be done for biotechnology, or physics, or any other clearly defined subject area.”

Knowledge becomes tangible when it is organized and accessible, which is what these technologies strive to produce.  As the organization of information becomes more detailed, so will precision in the answers to questions.  Some analysts say a narrow focus better satisfies a search term. General search companies could benefit from creating niche- focused engines that search through industry specific databases focused, for example, on health care, travel, or medicine.   By building a brand in different niches, companies could gain a steadily growing, loyal audience that could then be attracted to a more general service.  The key the search market is reliability and accuracy in generated answers and niche search platforms have been demonstrating both. 

By Kiran Sarabu

Labels: Advanced Computing, Web Technologies