<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Friday, January 16, 2004  

IBM's Web Fountain: Creating Computers that Are Not Glueless
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan04/0104comp1.html

Computers can manipulate vast amounts of data, without knowing what any of it actually means. Now a major breakthrough in the field of machine understanding could spell big business for its developer, IBM, as well as data miners, content providers, libraries and anyone else who relies on information. IBM's WebFountain is a huge collection of processors, routers and disk drives running a menagerie of software applications, all dedicated to one purpose: making sense of the churning ocean of information, opinion and falsehood that floods the Internet. WebFountain sucks in data like a search engine. Then its analysis engine sniffs out its own clues about a document's meaning and provides insight into what the search results mean in aggregate. WebFountain's most amazing trick: it converts unlabeled data into XML-labeled data. A variety of annotators, each specializing in a separate subject, scans each document looking for familiar references, and automatically adds XML tags when it spots them. Result: a uniform, structured format that can be searched and analyzed. In a few months, in partnership with online news company Factiva, IBM will launch a service to allow companies to track their reputations online: what journalists are reporting about them, which blogs have said what about them, even the latest buzz in chat rooms.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 5:10 AM
archives
subject tracers™