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

September 21, 2012

Local Search – How Hard Can It Be? [Unfolding Searches?]

Filed under: Local Search,Search Behavior,Search Engines,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 2:20 pm

Local Search – How Hard Can It Be? by Matthew Hurst.

From the post:

This week, Apple got a rude awakening with its initial foray into the world of local search and mapping. The media and user backlash to their iOS upgrade which removes Google as the maps and local search partner and replaces it with their own application (built on licensed data) demonstrates just how important the local scenario is to the mobile space.

While the pundits are reporting various (and sometimes amusing) issues with the data and the search service, it is important to remind ourselves how hard local search can be.

For example, if you search on Google for Key Arena – a major venue in Seattle located in the famous Seattle Center, you will find some severe data quality problems.

See Matthew’s post for the detail but I am mostly interesting in his final observation:

One of the ironies of local data conflation is that landmark entities (like stadia, large complex hotels, hospitals, etc.) tend to have lots of data (everyone knows about them) and lots of complexity (the Seattle Center has lots of things within it that can be confused). These factors conspire to make the most visible entities in some ways the entities more prone to problems.

Every library student is (or should be) familiar with the “reference interview.” A patron asks a question (consider this to be the search request, “Key Arena”) and a librarian uses the reference interview to further identify the information being requested.

Contrast that unfolding of the search request, which at any juncture offers different paths to different goals, with the “if you can identify it, you can find it,” approach of most search engines.

Computers have difficulty searching complex entities such as “Key Arena” successfully. Whereas starting with the same query with a librarian does not.

Doesn’t that suggest to you that “unfolding” searches may be a better model for computer searching than simple identification?

More than static facets, but a presentation of the details most likely to distinguish subjects searched for by users under similar circumstances. Dynamically.

Sounds like the sort of heuristic knowledge that topic maps could capture quite handily.

November 5, 2011

META’2012 International Conference on Metaheuristics and Nature Inspired Computing

META’2012 International Conference on Metaheuristics and Nature Inspired Computing

Dates:

  • Paper submission: May 15, 2012
  • Session/Tutorial submission: May 15, 2012
  • Paper notification: July 15, 2012
  • Session/Tutorial notification: June 15, 2012
  • Conference: October 27-31, 2012

From the website:

The 4th International Conference on Metaheuristics and Nature Inspired Computing, META’2012, will held in Port El-Kantaoiui (Sousse, Tunisia).

The Conference will be an exchange space thanks to the sessions of the research works presentations and also will integrate tutorials and a vocational training of metaheuristics and nature inspired computing.

The scope of the META’2012 conference includes, but is not limited to:

  • Local search, tabu search, simulated annealing, VNS, ILS, …
  • Evolutionary algorithms, swarm optimization, scatter search, …
  • Emergent nature inspired algorithms: quantum computing, artificial immune systems, bee colony, DNA computing, …
  • Parallel algorithms and hybrid methods with metaheuristics, machine learning, game theory, mathematical programming, constraint programming, co-evolutionary, …
  • Application to: logistics and transportation, telecommunications, scheduling, data mining, engineering design, bioinformatics, …
  • Theory of metaheuristics, landscape analysis, convergence, problem difficulty, very large neighbourhoods, …
  • Application to multi-objective optimization
  • Application in dynamic optimization, problems with uncertainty,bi-level optimization, …

The “proceedings” for Meta ’10 can be seen at: Meta ’10 papers. It would be more accurate to say “extended abstracts” because, for example,

Luis Filipe de Mello Santos, Daniel Madeira, Esteban Clua, Simone Martins and Alexandre Plastino. A parallel GRASP resolution for a GPU architecture

runs all of two (2) pages. As is about the average length of the other twenty (20) papers that I checked.

I like concise writing but two pages to describe a parallel GRASP setup on a GPU architecture? Just an enticement (there is an ugly word I could use) to get you to read the ISI journal with the article.

Conference and its content look very interesting. Can’t say I care for the marketing technique for the journals in question. Not objecting to the marketing of the journals, but don’t say proceedings when what is meant is ads for the journals.

September 5, 2011

How Hard is the Local Search Problem?

Filed under: Geographic Information Retrieval,Local Search,Mapping,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 7:33 pm

How Hard is the Local Search Problem? by Matthew Hurst.

The “local search” problem that Matthew is addressing is illustrated with Google’s mapping of local restaurants in Matthew’s neighborhood.

The post starts:

The local search problem has two key components: data curation (creating and maintaining a set of high quality statements about what the world looks like) and relevance (returning those statements in a manner that satisfies a user need. The first part of the problem is a key enabler to success, but how hard is it?

There are many problems which involve bringing together various data sources (which might be automatically or manually created) and synthesizing an improved set of statements intended to denote something about the real world. The way in which we judge the results of such a process is to take the final database, sample it, and test it against what the world looks like.

In the local search space, this might mean testing to see if the phone number in a local listing is indeed that associated with a business of the given name and at the given location.

But do we quantify this challenge? We might perform the above evaluation and find out that 98% of the phone numbers are correctly associated. Is that good? Expected? Poor?

After following Matthew through his discussion of the various factors in “local search,” what are your thoughts on Google’s success with “local search?”

Could you do better?

How? Be specific, a worked example would be even more convincing.

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