Re: [xmca] Fwd: [Air-L] Twine: The Semantic Web is Here!

From: Bruce Robinson <bruce who-is-at brucerob.eu>
Date: Sun Feb 03 2008 - 13:08:10 PST

I found this item somewhat ironic as almost exactly 25 years ago I was
involved at London University with two experts in librarianship in a
research project using a combination of AI techniques and library
classification and thesaural content to construct an intelligent
front-end / search engine for searching databases using natural
language. 21 years ago it was spun off to a start-up firm which finally
went under in 1991. All this happened before the Web and large public
use of the Internet. There are obvious penalties to being first - I
sometimes muse on what might have been if we'd done it five years later
- but it has taken quite a long time for others to catch up ;)

Bruce R
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Gerry Mckiernan <gerrymck@iastate.edu>
> Date: Sun, Feb 3, 2008 at 12:33 PM
> Subject: [Air-L] Twine: The Semantic Web is Here!
> To: onlinesocialnetworks@iastate.edu, air-l@listserv.aoir.org
>
>
> ***APOLOGIES FRO RECEIPT OF DUPLICATE POSTINGS***
>
> Colleagues/
>
> Our Facebook Friend Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan
> University in Bloomington is interviewed in the Feb 3 2008 NYTimes
> about Twine "a revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find
> information" [ http://www.twine.com/ ].
>
> /Gerry
>
> NYTimes |February 3, 2008 | Novelties
>
> An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots
> By ANNE EISENBERG
> HOW often have you wasted time searching through page after page of
> e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your
> computer, trying to find an important item?
>
This sounds like Google Desktop..

> If the answer is *too often,* a San Francisco company, Radar
> Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that
> may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving
> documents.
>
> Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names
> of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its
> algorithms recognize.
>
> Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of
> these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side
> of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the
> program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.
>
>
> Customers have individual accounts on Twine*s Web site, where they
> save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or
> *twines,* private, share them in groups with other members having
> common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines
> public.
>
> [snip]
>
> Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web
> - foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to
> process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely
> answer direct questions.
>
> Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University in
> Bloomington, became a member of Twine*s test group in November, partly
> because she and her husband, Ethan, a doctoral candidate, needed a place
> to organize all the documents they wanted to share with each other about
> teaching and learning.
>
> For More Of The Story (and Photos) ... Visit
>
> [
> http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/02/twine-semantic-web-is-here.html
> ]
>
> /Gerry
>
> Gerry McKiernan
> Associate Professor
> Science and Technology Librarian
> Iowa State University Library
> Ames IA 50011
>
> gerrymck@iastate.edu
>
> There is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come
> Victor Hugo
> [ http://www.blogger.com/profile/09093368136660604490 ]
>
> Iowa: Where the Tall Corn Flows and the (North)West Wind Blows ...
> [ http://www.alternativeenergyblogs.blogspot.com/ ]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sun Feb 3 13:11 PST 2008

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Mar 06 2008 - 10:37:02 PST