current and future trends in web search - seminar on web search

2 December 2005

Seminar on Web Search Current and Future Trends in Web Search

Prof. Beat Signer

Department of Computer Science

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

http://www.beatsigner.com

http://www.beatsigner.com/

http://www.beatsigner.com/

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected]

2 September 12, 2011

The Future of the Web

From a Web of documents (e.g. HTML

pages) to a Web of structured data and services semantic web and linked data

cloud computing

enabling technologies

- URI, XML, XHTML, RDF and OWL

The Internet as one global machine interoperability of services

automatic reasoning

The mobile web access information and services offered by the global machine

from everywhere at any time, feed the machine with new data and teach the machine new relationships between data



The Future of the Web ...

Internet of Things integration of physical objects with the global machine

physical world gets reflected in digital space via sensor input data

- RFID, GPS, temperature, ...

information and services managed by the global machine get projected into the physical space via augmented reality

Personal data that is nowadays stored in folders on

personal computers might move to the global machine

User interfaces for the global machine personalised filtering and recommendation of related information

based on user profiling and AI technologies

cross-media browsers



The Future of the Web ...

How will documents look like in the future? graph of linked data

documents as structural view of the linked data

How are the presented ideas related to the approaches

introduced earlier? e.g. Bush's Memex or Nelson's Xanadu

Do we need new publishing models for the creation of

linked data to be managed by the machine?

Finally, it is not only about connecting our data, services

and machines but we are the machine



The Future of the Internet

internet of things

web of data

self-organisation

cloud computing

security and privacy

mobile web

social computing

one global machine



The Semantic Web

Meaning of data on the Web can not only be infered by

people but also discovered by machines without (or with

less) human intervention

Web of data instead of web of documents the Web as a huge decentralised database (knowledge base)

machine-accessible data

data may be interconnected similar to today's webpages

combination of data from different sources to derive new facts

machine-readable metadata for existing web content

machines (agents) may use logical reasoning to infer facts that are not explicitly recorded

Crucial component of Web 3.0



Resource Description Framework (RDF)

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been

designed to describe data and metadata about specific subjects

structure of data sets

relationships between bits of data

An RDF statement (triple) consists of three parts subject

predicate (property)

object (value)

{person-1, name, "Niklaus Wirth"}

subject predicate object



Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

Personal information and connections to friends in RDF http://www.foaf-project.org

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:Person> <foaf:name>Beat Signer</foaf:name> <foaf:title>Prof.</foaf:title> <foaf:givenname>Beat</foaf:givenname> <foaf:family_name>Signer</foaf:family_name> <foaf:nick>Beat</foaf:nick> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>ce6d419869307d57839feef6445a9d64f784eb36</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> ... <foaf:knows> <foaf:Person> <foaf:name>Moira C. Norrie</foaf:name> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>4cb61b36a6feaa48c78acbb51fcce7cb356afdd6</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.globis.ethz.ch/people/norrie.rdf"> </foaf:Person> </foaf:knows> ... </foaf:Person> </rdf:RDF>



Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ...

First social Semantic Web application

Miller and Brickley, 2000

Describe a social network without a central database

links can be followed by

spiders (data mining)

no unique identifier

- identification by description

(pedicates and objects)

"six degrees of separation" or

"small world phenomenon"

FOAFNaut browser

[http://rdfweb.org/images/foaf/foafnaut-screenshot-path.jpg]



Semantic Wikis

Use Semantic Web

technologies to provide

machine-processable

Wiki content

page content

link metadata

Ontology reasoning

Existing semantic Wikis

DBPedia

Semantic MediaWiki

KiWi

...



Linked Data

Web of data instead of Web of documents Semantic Web

linked data as part of the Semantic Web

- based on URI, HTTP and RDF

various applications and search engines already make use of structured data on the Web

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/Lod-datasets_2009-07-14_colored.png]



Microformats

Add semantics to (X)HTML pages

Makes use of specific (X)HTML tag attributes class and rel attributes

- e.g. rel="nofollow" for search engines

Specific microformats

hCard: contact information

hCalendar: event information

hProduct: product information

Alternative solutions semantic web (RDFa)

...



hCard Microformat Example

Some search engines start

to pay attention to different

types of microformats

(e.g. hProduct)

<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard"> ... </head> ... <div class="vcard"> <div class="fn">Lode Hoste</div> <div class="org">Vrije Universiteit Brussel</div> <div class="tel">32 2629 3306</div> <a class="url" href="http://wise.vub.ac.be/members/lode/"> http://wise.vub.ac.be/members/lode/</a> </div>



RDF in Attributes (RDFa)

Add a set of attribute extensions to XHTML for

embedding RDF metadata

Different vocabularies FOAF, video, audio, commerce, …

Search engines (e.g. Yahoo and Google) process certain

RDFa metadata (e.g. product information)

<p xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ about="http://www.amazon.com/..."> and the will to live. <span property="dc:creator">Simpson</span> dedicates the book <cite property="dc:title">Touching the Void</cite> to the... The book was published in <span property="dc:date" content="1989-12-01">December 1989</span>. </p>



GoodRelations

Lightweight ontology for expressing

product information in e-commerce web applications

Product features offers

prices

units

...

Adopted by various companies Yahoo

BestBuy

...

Leads to enhanced product search functionality



Wolfram Alpha

Semantic search engine

Searches and computes

answers based on curated

set of structured data

Complements traditional

search engines



Location-Based Search

Use contextual information about a person's or

object's position as part of a query

Different possibilities to get a client's position (manually entered by user)

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Wi-Fi signal strength

cell phone tower triangulation,

RFID tags

...

Potential applications include navigation services, tracking services (e.g. parcels),

location-based advertising, recommender systems (e.g. nearby restaurants), augmented reality search, ...



Geotagging of Digital Resources

Add geographical metadata (latitude, longitude) to

different types of media websites

- e.g. special Geo microformat

photographs

videos

RSS feeds

...

Metadata can be added manually or automatically e.g. recent digital cameras automatically geotag new pictures



Location-Based Search

Location-based queries

for nearby services and

route finding

e.g. Google maps

map-based data fusion

Location-aware querying

can be combined with

social networking

e.g. foursquare

check-in at specific places

and get tips from colleagues

what about privacy?



Augmented Reality Search

The WIKITUDE World

browser presents

information about nearby

physical landmarks as

well as content added by

other users

Real-time augmentation of mobile phone camera view

WIKITUDE.me authoring tool to add points of interest

WIKITUDE API for augmented reality applications

Available for different types of mobile phones Android, iPhone, ...



Audio-Based Search

Audio search engines use

acoustic fingerprints of

recorded audio samples

use mobile phone micro-

phone to record a few

seconds of a song

send query to server

e.g. SoundHound or Shazam

Query by Humming (QbH)

find similar songs based on a

hummed melody

e.g. musipedia



Internet of Things

In the future we will see more and more network- or

Internet-enabled physical objects

Physical objects get linked to digital information and

services offered in the cloud

How many objects will there be? estimates of 100'000 billion and more objects

Is a simple tagging via RFID tags or barcodes enough? e.g. Barcode Hero or RedLaser

what if only a part of an object should be linked to data?

Is the simple mapping to a web presence (URI) enough?



Paper-Based Search

Interactive festival guide

for the Edinburgh Festival

Fringe

Multimodal interface

digital pen input

voice (input) and output

Augmented paper with

digital query functionality

"button"-based queries

map-based queries

advanced query interface via

paper bookmark



EdFest Documents



Image-Based Search

Reverse image search

engines to find different

versions of an image

e.g. TinEye

Image-based querying of

textual information

e.g. Google Goggles

Image retrieval with face

recognition

e.g. Flickr

what about privacy if used on

a global scale?



Personalisation

To deal with the sheer amount of data, we can apply

semantic filtering and recommedation on the web of data

The filtering and recommendation can be based on personal profiling

- monitoring a user's interaction with the global machine

social profiling

- investigate a user's social network

item classication

- find similar items based on intrinsic properties as well as collaborative

annotations



Social Search

Web search that makes

use of the Social Graph

for result ranking

e.g. Google Social Search

comments and input from

friends

note the similarity to

PageRank

Queries can also be

outsourced to colleagues

via Twitter, Facebook etc.



Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking

services store bookmarks and access

them from different browsers

share and discover bookmarks

e.g. delicious

Non-hierarchical classi-

fication based on tags

Social bookmarking services provide additional metadata

that can be used to improve search engine ranking

algorithms



The Google Effect

A recent study by Sparrow et al. shows that

people less likely remember things that they

believe to be accessible online Internet as a transactive memory

Does our memory work differently in the age of Google?

What implications will the future of the Internet and new

search have?



Conclusions

Rapidly changing environment with innovative non-

textual query interfaces semantic web, mobile applications, Internet of Things, ...

market for many specialised search engines

Technology brings new challenges for search engines e.g. increase in hidden data via Rich Internet applications (RIAs)

Growing amount of semantic data reasoning over linked data

Integration of results from different query engines e.g. Open Search and other initiatives

One global machine ...



References

The Friend of a Friend Project http://www.foaf-project.org

DBpedia http://dbpedia.org

Linked Data http://linkeddata.org

GoodRelations http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/

Foursquare https://foursquare.com



References ...

Wolfram Alpha http://www.wolframalpha.com

Wikitude http://www.wikitude.com

SoundHound http://www.soundhound.com

Musipedia http://www.musipedia.org

TineEye http://www.tineye.com



References ...

Delicious http://www.delicious.com

B. Signer, Fundamental Concepts for

Interactive Paper and Cross-Media Information Spaces,

ISBN 978-3-8370-2713-6, May 2008

B. Sparrow, J. Liu and D.M. Wegner, Google Effects on

Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information

at Our Fingertips, Science, July 2011

current and future trends in web search - seminar on web search

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