Semantic searching - Evri
I haven't written anything on the semantic internet recently, so I thought it time to return to the subject.
The recent news of the launch of Wolfram Alpha seems to have dominated the search news, and rightly so as the platform could go on to set a new era of systematic search.
Meanwhile the semantic internet continues to develop its multi-fronted march into the public eye.
Twine, running off Radar Networks semantic platform has recently undergone a face lift as the community continues to grow.
Headup have continued to grow their offering, recently taking part in the Israel Web Tour in the Silicon Valley and the new Headup music and social annotations with their release 1.0.3 of Headup.
But the purpose of this post is to briefly review a new player, well a new player for me, on the semantic search front, Evri.
Evri is a straight up search engine, available as a standard web page, that performs semantic searching.
Unlike Wolfram Alpha, who's aim is to answer questions asked of it (systematic searching), the aim of Evri is to find connections between objects, subjects, places, people etc (semantic searching).
To test the search, I searched for old musical favourites and acquaintances Plaid. They are well known enough to produce results, but obscure enough to see what interesting links/connections a search might find.
The results are interesting to browse through. They summarise various sources of information on the band, from Wiki descriptions, through to mentions on social media platforms and trend analysis.
The trend analysis adds a basic but interesting addition the results, giving some insight to the popularity of a subject. Unfortunately in this particular case there were more mentions of trousers than inspiring music.
The "Dig Deeper" column allows you to digress from your original search and explore related subjects, people etc. It also has a filter facility to filter by recent connections, categories or activity.
As is the need at the moment, the Evri site also has a community facility built in. You can create an account and then start to save subjects that you want to follow as they develop via a widget. This is available for download from the site.
You create a "collection" of subjects you want to follow, adding new definitions/profiles to the collections as you find them via a "Follow this" star that sits on the page.
You can then invite others to view your collections and become involved in adding to that collection other related profiles. This would have obvious benefits if you were working as part of a research team, or even an account team for specific clients.
The site has the usual share functions to share content amongst the myriad of social bookmarking platforms and social networking applications that we have all become accustomed to.
All in all, it looks very neat and could serve a helpful purpose in my usual rant about getting better value out of existing content.
I'd certainly consider using Evri in place of a Wiki investigation in future; helping me find answers when I encounter a subject I'm not sure of.
Equally I could see me using the search engine for investigating new clients before pitches or keeping track of exiting clients in the news.
The site is currently still in beta, but I'd recommend anyone to pop along and giving the search ago.
Related links:
Evri - http://www.evri.com
Twine - http://www.twine.com
Headup - http://www.headup.com
Headup - Semantic browser integration - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/headup-article-semantic-browser.html
Semantic web - The Foundations - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/semantic-web-foundations.html
Semantic internet - Intelligent web future - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/01/semantic-web-future-intelligent.html
The recent news of the launch of Wolfram Alpha seems to have dominated the search news, and rightly so as the platform could go on to set a new era of systematic search.
Meanwhile the semantic internet continues to develop its multi-fronted march into the public eye.
Twine, running off Radar Networks semantic platform has recently undergone a face lift as the community continues to grow.
Headup have continued to grow their offering, recently taking part in the Israel Web Tour in the Silicon Valley and the new Headup music and social annotations with their release 1.0.3 of Headup.
But the purpose of this post is to briefly review a new player, well a new player for me, on the semantic search front, Evri.
Evri is a straight up search engine, available as a standard web page, that performs semantic searching.
Unlike Wolfram Alpha, who's aim is to answer questions asked of it (systematic searching), the aim of Evri is to find connections between objects, subjects, places, people etc (semantic searching).
To test the search, I searched for old musical favourites and acquaintances Plaid. They are well known enough to produce results, but obscure enough to see what interesting links/connections a search might find.
The results are interesting to browse through. They summarise various sources of information on the band, from Wiki descriptions, through to mentions on social media platforms and trend analysis.
The trend analysis adds a basic but interesting addition the results, giving some insight to the popularity of a subject. Unfortunately in this particular case there were more mentions of trousers than inspiring music.
The "Dig Deeper" column allows you to digress from your original search and explore related subjects, people etc. It also has a filter facility to filter by recent connections, categories or activity.
As is the need at the moment, the Evri site also has a community facility built in. You can create an account and then start to save subjects that you want to follow as they develop via a widget. This is available for download from the site.
You create a "collection" of subjects you want to follow, adding new definitions/profiles to the collections as you find them via a "Follow this" star that sits on the page.
You can then invite others to view your collections and become involved in adding to that collection other related profiles. This would have obvious benefits if you were working as part of a research team, or even an account team for specific clients.
The site has the usual share functions to share content amongst the myriad of social bookmarking platforms and social networking applications that we have all become accustomed to.
All in all, it looks very neat and could serve a helpful purpose in my usual rant about getting better value out of existing content.
I'd certainly consider using Evri in place of a Wiki investigation in future; helping me find answers when I encounter a subject I'm not sure of.
Equally I could see me using the search engine for investigating new clients before pitches or keeping track of exiting clients in the news.
The site is currently still in beta, but I'd recommend anyone to pop along and giving the search ago.
Related links:
Evri - http://www.evri.com
Twine - http://www.twine.com
Headup - http://www.headup.com
Headup - Semantic browser integration - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/03/headup-article-semantic-browser.html
Semantic web - The Foundations - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/semantic-web-foundations.html
Semantic internet - Intelligent web future - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/01/semantic-web-future-intelligent.html
Labels: deep web searching, evri, headup, semantic internet, semantic web, Twine, wolfram alpha
blog comments powered by Disqus
posted by Ed Richardson at
11:00
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home