Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 1, 2015

Let Me Get That Data For You (LMGTDFY)

Filed under: Bing,Open Data,Python — Patrick Durusau @ 8:22 pm

Let Me Get That Data For You (LMGTDFY) by U.S. Open Data.

From the post:

LMGTDFY is a web-based utility to catalog all open data file formats found on a given domain name. It finds CSV, XML, JSON, XLS, XLSX, XML, and Shapefiles, and makes the resulting inventory available for download as a CSV file. It does this using Bing’s API.

This is intended for people who need to inventory all data files on a given domain name—these are generally employees of state and municipal government, who are creating an open data repository, and performing the initial step of figuring out what data is already being emitted by their government.

LMGTDFY powers U.S. Open Data’s LMGTDFY site, but anybody can install the software and use it to create their own inventory. You might want to do this if you have more than 300 data files on your site. U.S. Open Data’s LMGTDFY site caps the number of results at 300, in order to avoid winding up with an untenably large invoice for using Bing’s API. (Microsoft allows 5,000 searches/month for free.)

Now there’s a useful utility!

Enjoy!

I first saw this in a tweet by Pycoders Weekly.

March 31, 2014

150 Million Topics

Filed under: Bing,Merging,Search Engines,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 9:02 pm

150 Million More Reasons to Love Bing Everyday by Richard Qian.

From the post:

At Bing, we understand that search is more than simply finding information and browsing a collection of blue links pointing to pages around the web. We’ve talked about doing instead of searching and how Bing continues to expand its approach to understand the actual world around us.

Today, you’ll see this come to life on Bing.com in a feature called Snapshot. Snapshot brings together information that you need at a glance, with rich connections to deeper information on the people, places, and things you care about made possible by our deep understanding of the real world. To accomplish this, Bing now tracks billions of entities and perhaps more importantly, the billions of relationships between them, all to get you the right data instantly while you search.

New Entities: Introducing Doctors, Lawyers, Dentists and Real Estate Properties
….

In case you are interested, the “Snapshot” is what ISO/IEC 13250 (Dec., 1999) defined as a topic.

topic: An aggregate of topic characteristics, including zero or more names, occurrences, and roles played in association with other topics, whose organizing principle is a single subject.

Unlike the topic maps effort, Bing conceals all the ugliness that underlies merging of information and delivers to users an immediately useful and consumable information product.

But also unlike the topic maps effort, Bing is about as useful as a wedgie when you are looking for information internal to your enterprise.

Why?

Mostly because the subjects internal to your organization don’t get mapped by Bing.

Can you guess who is going to have to do that work? Got a mirror handy?

Use Bing’s Snapshots to see what collated information can look like. Decide if that’s a look you want for all or some of your information.

Hard to turn down free advertising/marketing from MS. It happens so rarely.

Thanks MS!

February 18, 2014

Better Search = Better Results

Filed under: Bing,Programming,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 11:29 am

Bing Code Search Makes Developers More Productive by Rob Knies.

The problem:

Software developers routinely rely on the Internet to find and reuse code samples that pertain to their current projects. Sites such as the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and StackOverflow provide a rich collection of code samples to address many of the needs programmers face.

The process for doing so, though, is not particularly streamlined. The developer has to exit the programming environment, switch to a browser, enter a search query, sift through the search results for useful code snippets, copy and paste a promising snippet back into the programming environment, and adapt the pasted snippet to the programming context at hand.

It works, but it’s not optimal.

The Solution:


The result of all this collaboration is a free add-in, which became available for download on Feb. 17, that makes it easier for .NET developers to search for and reuse code samples from across the coding community. The news about Bing Code Search also appears on the Bing and Visual Studio blogs.

The Payoff:

A recent study indicated that Bing Code Search provides to programmers a time improvement of more than 60 percent, compared with the browser-search-copy-and-paste scenario. (emphasis added)

Whether you use category theory with your spreadsheets or not, a 60 percent time improvement on code searching for your developers is impressive!

Your next goal should be 60 percent re-use of the code they find. 😉

PS: This is the type of metric semantic integration software needs to demonstrate. Take some concrete or even routine task that is familiar, time consuming and/or hard to get good search results. Save time and/or produce markedly better results.

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