The February, 2000 issue of Wired Magazine had an interesting article on
Autonomy (pp172-179) describing how this super search engine uses neural
networks and bayesian statistics to extract the patterns from a wide
variety of media. Autonomy is independent of language but the usefulness
depends on the quality of your training set.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/autonomy.html
Interesting stuff when you consider how this technology can be applied,
e.goo. match fingerprints, alert you to interesting newsfeeds that match
your morphing interests, point you to people and documents that can help
or contain similar ideas.
Like any tool there is a trick and you get nothing for nothing. I have
seen reports from folks that consider Autonomy (and other concept matching
engines) extractions to be very poor (too fragmented) but they did not
invest sufficient time in the correct training for the software. It can
also be used to alert one to unique, novel and interesting stuff depending
how you describe your preferences.
Expect to see quite a few products spring into this niche shortly, either
add-ons using the Autonomy engine or new twists like:
http://www.tacit.com/
That focus on e-messages & privacy or
http://www.orbitalsw.com/
seeking to leverage people finding people & community building or
http://www.askmecorp.com/prod-ent-overview.asp?si1=1
who claim to capture tacit knowledge
What is your experience with this exciting software category??
Can we really capture tacit knowledge or get close to meaning??
Denham Grey
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--Denham Grey <dgrey@iquest.net>
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