Smart search ... and specifics of Topic Maps approach


I read several interesting materials regarding search improvement last week: comments about Microsoft Search Champs conference, notes from Web 2.0 conference and Thomas B. Passin's book "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web". A lot of different ideas and approaches! These thought-provoking readings inspired me to elaborate on Topic Maps approach for solving search problem.

I would like to start with reference to Lars Marius Garshol's work "Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic maps!" and his summary of benefits of using Topic Maps for search. What is not probably obvious is how Topic Maps can be used by "traditional" search/directory engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN to implement new generation of search. And also how Topic Maps can be used for building Internet-scale search infrastructure.

1. Topic Maps - based approach shares understanding that people are searching mostly for information, not for "documents/resources".

2. Information is "hidden" in resources. Resources are optimized for reading by humans, not computers.

3. Automatic extraction of information from resources is expensive operation with limited reliability.

4. Automatic reliable matching queries with information in resources is expensive operation.

5. Context plays important role in search. People can play different roles and can switch area of interests.

6. Personalization is important. Each person can have own topics of interests and requirements for information retrieval. Personal interests are relatively stable.

Instead of concentrating on advanced general algorithms for 3 and 4 using 5 and 6, Topic Maps approach breaks tradition of working in a "resource world" and suggests to shift efforts to a world of "topics of our interests" or subject proxies.

Topic Maps approach concentrates more on a question of how to create a distributed network of information providers and consumers based on interchange standard for managing "maps" of subject proxies linked with resources.

Topic Maps approach is based on explicit management of subject proxies which represent "topics of our interests". With Topic Maps we also explicitly represent summary of information about subjects and their relationships.

We also connect "world of subjects" with "world of resources" using explicit links. Topic Maps approach does not really define how these links are created. It can be done manually by person, by sophisticated linguistic or statistical algorithms or combination of available methods.

Topic Maps approach is supported by ISO standard which helps to create, interchange and merge topic maps and in the future query and constraint topic maps.

Any person, organization, company can be provider of information using Topic Maps interchange standard.

Topic Maps standard does not force information providers to use topic maps for internal representation. Information suppliers can use relational, XML, object databases with different schemas to represent information. The only requirement is to provide "topic map view" using interchange standard.

If topic map views are available information from multiple suppliers can be aggregated. This aggregation can be done by aggregators (such as Google,Yahoo, MSN), and/or directly on desktop. This reminds us a world of RSS with exception that we are interested in distributing and aggregating topic maps instead of RSS feeds. Inspiring preview of desktop topic map aggaregation can be found in Steve Pepper's presentation "Seamless Knowledge with TMRAP"

Problem of search against network of resources is replaced by a problem of search against network of subject proxies and resources. Second approach can provide better user experience because it effectively bridges the gap between resources, subjects and users.

Posted: Sun - October 10, 2004 at 12:52 PM      

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