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

May 16, 2012

Google Advertises Topic Maps – Breaking News – Please ReTweet

Filed under: Google Knowledge Graph,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:50 pm

Actually the post is titled: Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings.

It reads in part:

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

Google just set the bar for search/information appliances, including topic maps.

What is the value add of your appliance when compared to Google?

When people ask me to explain topic maps now I can say:

You know Google’s Knowledge Graph? It’s like that but customized to your interests and data.

(I would just leave it at that. Let them start imagining what they want to do beyond the reach of Google. In their “dark data.”)

Who knew? Google advertising for topic maps. Without any click-through. Amazing.

1 Comment

  1. When I saw the video I smelled Metaweb at work here, and it appears I’m right about that.
    http://www.webpronews.com/knowledge-graph-google-officially-announces-its-things-results-2012-05
    http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html

    Metaweb’s Freebase always struck me as something that was very “topic mappy” without actually being a topic map.

    Comment by marijane — May 16, 2012 @ 4:10 pm

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