Conference session by Yu Su and Gang Wang at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 in San Jose, California.

1. 6/16/2009, SemTech’09, San Jose, CA
Yu Su, Gang Wang
User Contribution in Knowledge Management
--A Journey to Semantic Technology

2. Intuit Proprietary & Confidential2
Intuit

3. Intuit Proprietary & Confidential
The Semantic Technology Vision
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"The Semantic Web is an extension of the
current web in which information is given well-
defined meaning, better enabling computers
and people to work in cooperation.“
--Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila
(2001)

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Semantic Technology and Intuit
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Intuit
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QuickBooks Support Website http://www.quickbooks.com/support
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Content Management System
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User Tagging & Folksonomy
http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/knowledgebasearticle/1011011
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User Tags  Social Semantics?
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1603
download
Error 1321
multi-user
vista

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User Tags  Social Semantics?

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User Tags  Social Semantics?

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Benefits and Next Steps
Immediate Benefits
– Cross promotion of articles with shared tags
– Provides better help to call-center agents
Next Steps
– Experiment with more advanced tagging: User generated
triples
– Use Common Tag to link concepts and deal with synonyms
Outcome: Leverage user contributed data to
– Improve knowledge base taxonomy: Better semantic graphs
that complements the directory tree
– Quicker and more relevant information for decision making
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Next Step: A Social Semantic Web

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Quicken

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Problem #1: Payee Identification
Our Favorites:
 DIOCESE OF SJ DES:REG SALARY
ID:RGD000000970668
INDN:RUKONIC,ALEKSANDRA CO
ID:1942734503 PPD
REF:000144317946121108250007029016260316
07013122
 PAYPAL DES:INST XFER ID:5XD222SDHQ582
INDN:MARKO RUKONIC CO ID:PAYPALSI66
WEB
REF:000144317946121108250007031001321376
07013127

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 SAFEWAY STORE 05-03 CUSTOMER
1114 PURCHASE #934054 FREMONTCA
 FRESH CHOICE #4 04/30 CARD #6312
PURCHASE
#24210737120286180800552 SAN
JOSE, CA
 PARAMOUNT'S GR AMERICA 04/28
CARD #1114 PURCHASE
#24610437119004024018539 SANTA
CLARA, CA
 DIOCESE OF SJ DES:REG SALARY
ID:RGD000000970668
INDN:RUKONIC,ALEKSANDRA CO
ID:1942734503 PPD
REF:0001443179461211082500070290
1626031607013122
 PAYPAL DES:INST XFER
ID:5XD222SDHQ582 INDN:MARKO
RUKONIC CO ID:PAYPALSI66 WEB
REF:0001443179461211082500070310
0132137607013127
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From: To
• Safeway
• Fresh Choice
• Great America
• MY PAYCHECK
• Paypal Income
Quicken User Contributed Payee Identification

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Problem #2: Categorization
04/20/08 CHEF CHU'S $23.67
04/19/08 CHEVY'S $11.34
03/18/08 STARBUCKS $3.78
02/01/08 FRESH CHOICE $17.22
 How much did I spend this year on lunch? Coffee?
 The chore of repetitious work:
 Average customer has a checking and a credit card account
 They have 50 transactions per month
 Most of them are recurring – keep shopping at favorite stores
 It takes a lot of time to categorize all those
 Imagine 1000s of customers doing this work all the time, all
over again
- LUNCH
- LUNCH
- COFFEE
- DINING

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Quicken ACE: Automatic Categorization Engine
• Quicken ACE collects information from all its users
and builds up its knowledge database.
• Some databases:
– Payee recognition
– Transaction categorization
– Bill and check recognition
– Personalized category management
– Popular categories for a payee
– Payee name completion, Quicken style
 Every time a user categorizes a transaction or
renames a payee, we store that.
 Lots of data – our valuable asset

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1. Seeded with large static merchant list
2. Personalized category and payee renaming (with
new category, new merchant)
3. User contributed data is used to improve/enrich the
seed knowledge base
4. Community voting as the guardian
5. Statistics of different semantic attributes is
reflected in GUI
Quicken ACE: Evolve Semantics with User
Contributed Data

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Tax Time!
• ACE can map every
expense to a tax line item
– Itemized deductions are not a
chore any more
– Where there is a link between
category and tax line item
– Small businesses and rental
property owners win!
– ACE supports any number of
category sets

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Lessons Learned
• User want to contribute when
– it is easy to make such contribution
– there is pain/value
• Tagging is a powerful way
–How complicated can we push it?
–Common Tags
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View Points
• Knowledge is a living breathing thing
–Ivory tower approach for building semantic webs won’t
work
• User contribution will stay
–As an iconic feature of Web 2.0, user contribution will
stay and will pave the way to Web 3.0
• Call for user centric tool design
–Need tools to enable, improve, and fuse user
contributed data with expert maintained
ontology/semantics.
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Thank You!
Questions and Conversations