Smart search, blinkx and ... Topic Maps


I was experimenting with blinkx recently and I tried to understand how close/far it is from subject centric computing model.

Blinkx "attaches" nicely itself to Internet Explorer, Word and several other programs. When you look at resource using these programs you can select some phrase and blinkx will try to find available resources which are related to concept(s) in selected phrase. Blinkx has several channels for resources: local drive, internet, news, products, video clips and web logs. List of channels can be extended. That's nice.

What is not so nice, I think, is that concept of subjects is hidden and not available for users. When I select some phrase blinkx tries to find "ideas not keywords" behind this phrase. But I cannot really see what blinkx's guess is. I only can see resources which somehow are related to blinkx's guess.

I think better results can be achieved if we introduce subject proxies explicitly and allow user to manage subjects of his/her interests. I would split channels into two groups. First group represents subjects which I am interested in: People, Projects, Technologies, Products etc. Second group represents resources such as News, Reports, Video Clips etc.

When I select some phrase on a web page or document, entries in all channels (resources and subjects) can be activated with different "relevancy" level. I personally will go in most cases to "subject" channels and will jump to "subject page" which is a summary of information about specific subject combined from different sources. So when I select word "Troy" on a web page I would like to have activated subject proxy for city "Troy" in my City channel and subject proxy for movie "Troy" in Movie channel and in my DVD channel... well... DVD "Troy". Relevancy can be assigned based on whatever algorithms are available for web page "subject scanning".

As a next step I can jump, for example, to Troy-movie. My smart search client (with my help) "knows" now better what I am really interested in. It can go to server(s) and retrieve summary information about Troy-movie. Troy-movie is in my focus now, it changes activation level of different resources and subject proxies.

So if I look at People channel I will probably see several names related to this movie. I can jump to one of this names and activation level of resources and subject proxies will be changed again.

Now, let's say I selected a name of a person on a web page and my smart search client cannot give me any reasonable suggestions. Well... I drag and drop this name to People channel and new local subject proxy is created. As a next step my smart search client goes to server environment and tries to find well known subject matching my local subject. If there are some suggestions and I agree with one of them my local proxy becomes connected with "world wide" subject proxy network.

Server environment can monitor "false" subject requests and create new public subject proxies for subjects which become "popular".

That's how I see smart search...

Posted: Tue - September 28, 2004 at 08:25 PM      

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