Seminar consisting of 3 lectures on Web Search. Previous lecture.

1. Seminar on Web Search
Current and Future Trends in Web Search
Prof. Beat Signer
Department of Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://www.beatsigner.com
2 December 2005

2. The Future of the Web
 From a Web of documents (e.g. HTML
pages) to a Web of structured data and services
 semantic web and linked data
 cloud computing
 enabling technologies
- URI, XML, XHTML, RDF and OWL
 The Internet as one global machine
 interoperability of services
 automatic reasoning
 The mobile web
 access information and services offered by the global machine
from everywhere at any time, feed the machine with new data and
teach the machine new relationships between data
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 2

3. The Future of the Web ...
 Internet of Things
 integration of physical objects with the global machine
 physical world gets reflected in digital space via sensor input data
- RFID, GPS, temperature, ...
 information and services managed by the global machine get
projected into the physical space via augmented reality
 Personal data that is nowadays stored in folders on
personal computers might move to the global machine
 User interfaces for the global machine
 personalised filtering and recommendation of related information
based on user profiling and AI technologies
 cross-media browsers
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 3

4. The Future of the Web ...
 How will documents look like in the future?
 graph of linked data
 documents as structural view of the linked data
 How are the presented ideas related to the approaches
introduced earlier?
 e.g. Bush's Memex or Nelson's Xanadu
 Do we need new publishing models for the creation of
linked data to be managed by the machine?
 Finally, it is not only about connecting our data, services
and machines but we are the machine
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 4

5. The Future of the Internet
internet of things security and privacy
web of data mobile web
self-organisation social computing
cloud computing one global machine
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 5

6. The Semantic Web
 Meaning of data on the Web can not only be infered by
people but also discovered by machines without (or with
less) human intervention
 Web of data instead of web of documents
 the Web as a huge decentralised database (knowledge base)
 machine-accessible data
 data may be interconnected similar to today's webpages
 combination of data from different sources to derive new facts
 machine-readable metadata for existing web content
 machines (agents) may use logical reasoning to infer facts that
are not explicitly recorded
 Crucial component of Web 3.0
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 6

7. Resource Description Framework (RDF)
 The Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been
designed to describe
 data and metadata about specific subjects
 structure of data sets
 relationships between bits of data
 An RDF statement (triple) consists of three parts
 subject
 predicate (property)
 object (value)
{person-1, name, "Niklaus Wirth"}
subject predicate object
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 7

8. Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
 Personal information and connections to friends in RDF
 http://www.foaf-project.org
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Beat Signer</foaf:name>
<foaf:title>Prof.</foaf:title>
<foaf:givenname>Beat</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Signer</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:nick>Beat</foaf:nick>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>ce6d419869307d57839feef6445a9d64f784eb36</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
...
<foaf:knows>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Moira C. Norrie</foaf:name>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>4cb61b36a6feaa48c78acbb51fcce7cb356afdd6</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.globis.ethz.ch/people/norrie.rdf">
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
...
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 8

9. Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ...
 First social Semantic Web
application
 Miller and Brickley, 2000
 Describe a social network
without a central database
 links can be followed by
spiders (data mining)
 no unique identifier [http://rdfweb.org/images/foaf/foafnaut-screenshot-path.jpg]
- identification by description
(pedicates and objects)
 "six degrees of separation" or
"small world phenomenon"
 FOAFNaut browser
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 9

10. Semantic Wikis
 Use Semantic Web
technologies to provide
machine-processable
Wiki content
 page content
 link metadata
 Ontology reasoning
 Existing semantic Wikis
 DBPedia
 Semantic MediaWiki
 KiWi
 ...
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 10

11. Linked Data
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8c/Lod-datasets_2009-07-14_colored.png]
 Web of data instead of Web of documents
 Semantic Web
 linked data as part of the Semantic Web
- based on URI, HTTP and RDF
 various applications and search engines already make use of
structured data on the Web
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 11

12. Microformats
 Add semantics to (X)HTML pages
 Makes use of specific (X)HTML tag attributes
 class and rel attributes
- e.g. rel="nofollow" for search engines
 Specific microformats
 hCard: contact information
 hCalendar: event information
 hProduct: product information
 Alternative solutions
 semantic web (RDFa)
 ...
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 12

13. hCard Microformat Example
<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2006/03/hcard">
...
</head>
...
<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">Lode Hoste</div>
<div class="org">Vrije Universiteit Brussel</div>
<div class="tel">32 2629 3306</div>
<a class="url" href="http://wise.vub.ac.be/members/lode/">
http://wise.vub.ac.be/members/lode/</a>
</div>
 Some search engines start
to pay attention to different
types of microformats
(e.g. hProduct)
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 13

14. RDF in Attributes (RDFa)
 Add a set of attribute extensions to XHTML for
embedding RDF metadata
 Different vocabularies
 FOAF, video, audio, commerce, …
 Search engines (e.g. Yahoo and Google) process certain
RDFa metadata (e.g. product information)
<p xmlns:dc=http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
about="http://www.amazon.com/...">
and the will to live. <span property="dc:creator">Simpson</span>
dedicates the book <cite property="dc:title">Touching the Void</cite> to
the... The book was published in <span property="dc:date"
content="1989-12-01">December 1989</span>.
</p>
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 14

15. GoodRelations
 Lightweight ontology for expressing
product information in e-commerce web applications
 Product features
 offers
 prices
 units
 ...
 Adopted by various companies
 Yahoo
 BestBuy
 ...
 Leads to enhanced product search functionality
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 15

16. Wolfram Alpha
 Semantic search engine
 Searches and computes
answers based on curated
set of structured data
 Complements traditional
search engines
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 16

17. Location-Based Search
 Use contextual information about a person's or
object's position as part of a query
 Different possibilities to get a client's position
 (manually entered by user)
 Global Positioning System (GPS)
 Wi-Fi signal strength
 cell phone tower triangulation,
 RFID tags
 ...
 Potential applications include
 navigation services, tracking services (e.g. parcels),
location-based advertising, recommender systems
(e.g. nearby restaurants), augmented reality search, ...
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 17

18. Geotagging of Digital Resources
 Add geographical metadata (latitude, longitude) to
different types of media
 websites
- e.g. special Geo microformat
 photographs
 videos
 RSS feeds
 ...
 Metadata can be added manually or automatically
 e.g. recent digital cameras automatically geotag new pictures
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 18

19. Location-Based Search
 Location-based queries
for nearby services and
route finding
 e.g. Google maps
 map-based data fusion
 Location-aware querying
can be combined with
social networking
 e.g. foursquare
 check-in at specific places
and get tips from colleagues
 what about privacy?
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 19

20. Augmented Reality Search
 The WIKITUDE World
browser presents
information about nearby
physical landmarks as
well as content added by
other users
 Real-time augmentation of mobile phone camera view
 WIKITUDE.me authoring tool to add points of interest
 WIKITUDE API for augmented reality applications
 Available for different types of mobile phones
 Android, iPhone, ...
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 20

21. Audio-Based Search
 Audio search engines use
acoustic fingerprints of
recorded audio samples
 use mobile phone micro-
phone to record a few
seconds of a song
 send query to server
 e.g. SoundHound or Shazam
 Query by Humming (QbH)
 find similar songs based on a
hummed melody
 e.g. musipedia
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 21

22. Internet of Things
 In the future we will see more and more network- or
Internet-enabled physical objects
 Physical objects get linked to digital information and
services offered in the cloud
 How many objects will there be?
 estimates of 100'000 billion and more objects
 Is a simple tagging via RFID tags or barcodes enough?
 e.g. Barcode Hero or RedLaser
 what if only a part of an object should be linked to data?
 Is the simple mapping to a web presence (URI) enough?
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 22

23. Paper-Based Search
 Interactive festival guide
for the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe
 Multimodal interface
 digital pen input
 voice (input) and output
 Augmented paper with
digital query functionality
 "button"-based queries
 map-based queries
 advanced query interface via
paper bookmark
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 23

24. EdFest Documents
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 24

25. Image-Based Search
 Reverse image search
engines to find different
versions of an image
 e.g. TinEye
 Image-based querying of
textual information
 e.g. Google Goggles
 Image retrieval with face
recognition
 e.g. Flickr
 what about privacy if used on
a global scale?
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 25

26. Personalisation
 To deal with the sheer amount of data, we can apply
semantic filtering and recommedation on the web of data
 The filtering and recommendation can be based on
 personal profiling
- monitoring a user's interaction with the global machine
 social profiling
- investigate a user's social network
 item classication
- find similar items based on intrinsic properties as well as collaborative
annotations
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 26

27. Social Search
 Web search that makes
use of the Social Graph
for result ranking
 e.g. Google Social Search
 comments and input from
friends
 note the similarity to
PageRank
 Queries can also be
outsourced to colleagues
via Twitter, Facebook etc.
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 27

28. Social Bookmarking
 Social bookmarking
services
 store bookmarks and access
them from different browsers
 share and discover book-
marks
 e.g. delicious
 Non-hierarchical classi-
fication based on tags
 Social bookmarking services provide additional metadata
that can be used to improve search engine ranking
algorithms
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 28

29. The Google Effect
 A recent study by Sparrow et al. shows that
people less likely remember things that they
believe to be accessible online
 Internet as a transactive memory
 Does our memory work differently in the age of Google?
 What implications will the future of the Internet and new
search have?
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 29

30. Conclusions
 Rapidly changing environment with innovative non-
textual query interfaces
 semantic web, mobile applications, Internet of Things, ...
 market for many specialised search engines
 Technology brings new challenges for search engines
 e.g. increase in hidden data via Rich Internet applications (RIAs)
 Growing amount of semantic data
 reasoning over linked data
 Integration of results from different query engines
 e.g. Open Search and other initiatives
 One global machine ...
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 30

31. References
 The Friend of a Friend Project
 http://www.foaf-project.org
 DBpedia
 http://dbpedia.org
 Linked Data
 http://linkeddata.org
 GoodRelations
 http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/
 Foursquare
 https://foursquare.com
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 31

32. References ...
 Wolfram Alpha
 http://www.wolframalpha.com
 Wikitude
 http://www.wikitude.com
 SoundHound
 http://www.soundhound.com
 Musipedia
 http://www.musipedia.org
 TineEye
 http://www.tineye.com
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 32

33. References ...
 Delicious
 http://www.delicious.com
 B. Signer, Fundamental Concepts for
Interactive Paper and Cross-Media Information Spaces,
ISBN 978-3-8370-2713-6, May 2008
 B. Sparrow, J. Liu and D.M. Wegner, Google Effects on
Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information
at Our Fingertips, Science, July 2011
September 12, 2011 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 33