Zzzoot

Project Torngat is a research project here at NRC - CISTI   [ Note that I am no longer at CISTI and that I am now continuing this work at Carleton University - GN 2010 04 07 ] that looks to use the full-text of journal articles to construct semantic journal maps for use in -- among other things -- projecting article search results onto the map to visualize the results and support interactive exploration and discovery of related articles, term and journals. Starting with 5.7 million full-text articles from 2200+ journals (mostly science, technology and medical (STM)), and using LuSql , Lucene , Semantic Vectors , R , and processing , a two dimensional mapping of a 512 dimension semantic space was created which revealed an excellent correspondence with the 23 human-created journal categories: Semantic Journal Space of 2231 Journals Scaled to Two Dimensions This initial work was initiated to find a technique that would scale, and follow-up work is looking at integrati...

I am in Denver today, giving the afternoon plenary at today's Next Gen Library Interface Conference , put on by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries . I'd like to thank George Machovec , associate director of "the Alliance", for inviting me down. The meeting is a mix of vendor presentations with two plenaries: Morning Keynote: Marshall Breeding , Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University Library Vendor presentation: Encore (III) break Vendor presentation: AquaBrowser Vendor presentation: Primo (Ex Libris) lunch Afternoon Keynote: Glen Newton , Researcher, Information Science, NRC-CISTI, National Research Council Canada: Open source tools and case study . break Vendor presentation: WorldCat Local (OCLC) Vendor presentation: Indigo (TLC) Here is my presentation . PowerPoint created in Open Office. Related post (Marshal Breeding): 2008 Feb 23: Openness in the library (technology) Update March 28: Link to Colorado Alliance of Resear...

This amazing mobile device mock-up (I'd love one for my birthday tomorrow!), is described by Hard Geek as having "advanced search function". Is this how I would describe it, or how the average user would describe it? Rather, by the time this level of hardware technology is available, the concept of "search" will (should?) have disappeared (to the user at least), and devices will instead should have a seamless understanding of the world around them, including an intimate semantic understanding of their user's short- and long-term goals. No (or very very few) explicit search boxes; instead, they will be extremely context aware, where context includes: geography, orientation, weather, user history, user voice conversation, user goal(s), interactions with other users' similar (trusted and untrusted) devices, specific user inquiries etc. Devices such as this one would be giant (transparent for the most part) mashups, deriving their suggestions and answers fr...

I'd like to introduce something I call drill clouds , an extension to tag clouds for search refinement in information retrieval. I will be using an experimental Lucene -based search platform that I have developed, called Ungava (more in this later), which includes my implementation of drill clouds. Note that much of this posting is derived from a posting of mine on drill clouds on the CISTI Lab wiki . Drill clouds are what I call an extension to tag clouds to make them a useful tool for search refinement. That is, to use a tag cloud to refine an existing query by adding new elements to the query through interactions with the cloud. As this results in a kind of drill-down search behaviour, these new clouds have been named drill clouds . Some differences between traditional tag clouds and drill clouds: Tags in drill clouds can be any useful metadata and are not necessarily user applied or exclusively keyword-like (but can include controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies,...