BarCamp Proposals: Factolex, Social Enhanced Search

Hello Monday! I am a bit tired today as I did not really have a weekend but spent it in a rather intellectually stimulating fashion, attending BarCamp Vienna held on the premises of HP in the 12th district. My head is still buzzing from all the input!

Originally, the plan had been to have a marketing-themed BarCamp, but thanks to the bottom-up approach towards scheduling typical for BarCamps, that didn’t quite come to pass (greatly appreciated also that this wasn’t enforced by the organizers, thank you!). There were two sessions in the ones that I attended that have relevance for the Social Semantic Web:

One was held by Alexander Kirk about the latest improvements in Factolex, a collaborative, micro-content encyclopedia based on facts; I hear that Factolex will receive further semantic enhancements in the near future, so I’ll write a longer blog post about it then. One feature Alex showed and which impressed me considerably was the distributed way in which one can add further facts to Factolex now: On any webpage, highlight a word or phrase (e.g. “President of the European commission”) and then click on the bookmarklet. Factolex is automatically going to check whether it knows the term already and either creates a new one or adds a fact to an existing term. The source will be added automatically – pretty nifty!

Another project that does not yet have a name and that is currently in stealth mode was presented by Christian Zeidler: Social Enhanced Search on del.icio.us. The project addresses a well known del.icio.us problem: You can search your bookmarks, i.e. search the tags and possibly definitions you might have added – yet all too often this only leads to the problem that your search query does not match the tags you once assigned. Being able to search the full text of the saved page would improve the scenario considerably – and this is exactly the approach Christian’s project takes.

To begin with, he built his own search index using Lucene, an open source, full-featured text search engine library written in Java. Of course it doesn’t crawl the whole web – just the pages you have added to your del.icio.us account. Instead of building one index for every user, Christian decided to have one large search index which also takes away the troubles of double indexation – the current index, based on 800 pages, doesn’t exceed a size of 3MB, which seems rather reasonable.

Apart from your own bookmarks, the plan is to also allow searching the bookmarks of your friends on del.icio.us, giving your search perspective. How many friends do you have on Facebook, how many on del.icio.us? It’s about half a dozen on del.icio.us for me, so I guess that “friendship” here really stands for particular topics and interests – this social perspective thing might actually work for enhanced searches, I think.

What other means are there to weight and rank search results? Somebody raised the issue of customization, i.e. let the user define which weight he’d like to give the results of which friend. I completely agree with Christian when he said he doesn’t believe people want customization, as conscious, user-initiated customization efforts are often (considered) too high. Instead, the system must learn from the data, e.g. prefer the results of friends whose results you use the most often.

Another useful feature that is already in place is that you can add any RSS feed to your search index as well – this is indeed very neat. And finally, in addition and as a point of reference, the prototype displayed the Lucene-based results in one column, and Yahoo! Search BOSS results in another column. Not surprisingly, the Search BOSS results were rather general, and the Lucene-based results rather specific – and that specificity is what you’d expect from searching your own bookmarks.

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