MT Help Request
“…I am working on a semantic search engine plugin for Movable Type.
The technique I have been working with, called latent semantic analysis, uses linear algebra to examine patterns of word use across many blog entries and make intelligent guesses about the topics those entries cover…”
And goes onto to ask for dumps of content to test against, so sent him participo. This is really interesting and could mean that blogs really, really start being perceived as the knowledge management systems they are.
I looked at this quite closely for my MA dissertation (which I’ll post once it’s been graded etc) – the traits of developing domain expertise, such as semantic encoding and metacognition are performed by the blog automatically. Blog’s one major weakness in being able to infer relationships between data, was the reliance on user inputted keywords (which we do on participo). These 3/4 keywords obviously don’t have the semantic richness that humans associate with meta data and so the system retains a useful, but primitive ability to develop and display semantic inferrence.
Mind you, the other conclusion was that this information *and* it’s metadata now resides in a shareable system – so the expertise traits that were locked away in someone’s head are now being distributed. And that surely is Knowledge Management if ever I ever I saw it. Add to that comments, archiving and ease of use…
The link above also refers to a not too boring article on the whole semantic web thing.
And a typically enlightening article on the whole thing at Better Living Through Software. Which is also the best name I’ve heard for a while.