Presentation by Seth Grimes (http://twitter.com/sethgrimes) at the Enterprise Search Summit, May 15, 2012.

1. The State of Semantics
Seth Grimes
Alta Plana Corporation
@sethgrimes
Enterprise Search Summit
May 15, 2012

2. The State of Semantics 2
“A computer
would deserve
to be called
intelligent if it
could deceive a
human into
believing that it
was human.”
Our goal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alan_Turing_photo.jpg

3. The State of Semantics 3
Are we there yet?
The Far Side
by Gary Larson
Ken Jennings, IBM Watson, and Brad Rutter play Jeopardy!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Watson_Jeopardy.jpg

4. The State of Semantics 4
Ingredients:
Semantics
Pragmatics
Syntax
… and knowledge and structure.
“Reading from text in general is a hard problem,
because it involves all of common sense knowledge.
But reading from text in structured domains I don’t
think is as hard. It is a critical problem that needs to
be solved.” – Edward Feigenbaum

5. The State of Semantics 5
Semantics: The study and use of meaning and
relationships.
Semantics in practice: A dismissive criticism
and seven semantic technologies:
“That’s just semantics.”
1. Semantic search.
2. Semantic navigation.
3. Semantic advertising.
4. Semantic content enrichment.
5. Semantic data integration.
6. The Semantic Web.
7. Semantic analysis.

6. The State of Semantics 6
Eugène
Delacroix,
St. Michael
Defeats the
Devil
Thus the Orb he roam'd
With narrow search; and with inspection deep
Consider'd every Creature, which of all
Most opportune might serve his Wiles.
-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

7. The State of Semantics 7
Old Search Semantic Search
Search on: keywords + identity, history & context
Sources: content/type silos Unified
Indexed: terms + metadata (properties)
Returned: hit lists Categories / clusters /
answers first
Relevance: PageRank (Inferred) intent
Prevalence: plenty of new Plenty of established
platforms with old(ish) search with new(ish)
search capabilities, also wanna-
bes.

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New but old: Dumb and siloed

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Better?

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More
better?

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What about (2009-10 articles)…

12. The State of Semantics 12
Meh.

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Information access w/structure, sentiment:
Context Search
sensitive? intent?
Sentiment

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From search to navigation…
Semantic search finds and produces
information that supports the searcher’s
immediate goal, across appropriate
sources.
Semantic navigation lets the searcher
explore the result set via relationships
found in the content (and
metainformation).
(Advertising is pervasive. When is it semantic?)

15. The State of Semantics 15

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To enrichment and integration…
Semantic enrichment and integration join
across types and/or sources and/or
structures, using the meaningful
identifiers, to create an ensemble that is
greater than the sum of the parts.
Enrichment and integration involve:
• Mappings and transformations.
• Aggregation and collection.
• All the typical data concerns: cleansing,
profiling, consistency, security,…

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Content, composites, connections.

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CCC 2.

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Where do the semantics come from?
Semantic analysis discerns and extracts
features including relationships from source
materials.
Features = entities, key-value pairs, concepts,
topics, events, sentiment, etc.
Semantic analysis may draw on:
• Statistics.
• Patterns (regular expressions).
• Linguistics (lexicons and rules).
• Machine learning.

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Semantic analysis fuels:
• Text analytics…text-extended BI.
• Search and search-based applications.
• SEO.

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Text Analytics
As part of a larger solutions...

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Semantic analysis may also apply to:
• Audio including speech.
• Images.
• Video.
http://www.geekosystem.com/
facebook-face-recognition/
http://flylib.com/books/en/2.495.1.54/1/ http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc
e/article/pii/S0167639312000118

25. The State of Semantics 25
Last, the Semantic Web
An assemblage of standards, protocols, and functions.
http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/
semantic-university/semantic-search-
and-the-semantic-web
http://img.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/m/02dtnzv

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“The Semantic Web has been and remains a parallel,
incomplete, never-up-to-date subset of the World
Wide Web and the databases accessible through it.”
– self-quote, June 2010
http://www.cambridgesemantics.com/
semantic-university/semantic-search-
and-the-semantic-web
http://img.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/m/02dtnzv

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The state of semantics?

28. The State of Semantics 28
Online & social change everything.
http://techpresident.com/news/21618/pol
itico-facebook-sentiment-analysis-bogus

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Pragmatic.

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Personal. Mobile.
http://timoelliott.com/blog/2010/10/sap-businessobjects-augmented-
explorer-now-available-resources-to-test-it.html

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Visual.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_york_times_longitude.php
+ http://beta620.nytimes.com/viewer/longitude/

32. Fun.

33. The State of Semantics 33
The times, they aren’t a-changin’

34. The State of Semantics
Seth Grimes
Alta Plana Corporation
@sethgrimes
Enterprise Search Summit
May 15, 2012