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Post-Googleism At IBM With Piquant

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the find-the-prettiest-girl-in-new-jersey dept.

kamesh writes "James Fallows of the New York Times reports an interesting search technology that IBM is developing. IBM demonstrated a system called Piquant, which analyzed the semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed 'knowledge' that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question, 'Who is Canada's prime minister?' even though those exact words didn't appear in the article. What do you think?"

1 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Trust Issue by Flamefly · · Score: 5, Interesting
    On a global scale this system tends to fall apart, there is a constant issue of trust when dealing with what looks to me, to be the holy grail of the semantic web.

    What if 2 sites said the Prime Minister of Canada was Santa? explicity said it, would that overwrite the linked information? How would the system know what is right? You can't always just pick the majority answer, so you need to set up little areas of trust "I trust www.thisplace.com and everything it says" and that site in turn will say "I trust www.overhere.com" but who allocates the trust, couldn't those people be biased?

    The semantic web will have a fantastic impact on the world, but the trust issue is something that needs to be addressed, and I don't see how it can ever, globally be done.

    More likely we would have systems like this for individual sites, or intranets, trusted circles that would be unlikely to contradict themselves.

    hopefully one day, if we truely get a global semantic web, we can see if the answer really is 42 :]