The advancement of web search has focused on developing tools and algorithms that will take you to the most apt page given your search query. Of course, as we have known from the heady days of the early web back in the mid-1990s the advent and demise of AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Dogpile, Lycos, Yahoo and countless other search engines pretty much all-but drowned in the inexorable wake of Google, we rarely find a single site in the results. Commonly, there are page after page of SERPs (search engine results pages) and those above the fold on page one are not necessarily the most appropriate.
But, focus isn’t everything, the original notion of surfing the internet and thence the web as about the serendipitous stumbling upon something of interest, something that was not necessarily what you were originally after. The emergence of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit allowed other people to share with you their finds accidental or otherwise and then web 2.0 with its spotlight shining brightly on social has taken that to a whole new level with the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and many others. Indeed, it is almost as if the old-school search engine that spiders and indexes sites without personal context is almost redundant.
Now, James Hendler of the Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, New York, USA, working with Andrew Hugill of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, in Leicester, UK, hope to turn the notion of a focused search engine on its head to instill in the search process an element of creative expression that was inherent to the early web. They hope that they can reinvigorate search, not by making it more focused with algorithmic updates and slurpier spiders but by reintroducing the serendipitous, reducing the impact of the social collation and curation. With their approach they want to exploit the precision of semantic web technologies by combining them with the ambiguity of natural language.
Hendler and Hugill talk of the “syzygy surfer”. Syzygy, from the Greek meaning “yoked together”. In their concept they have yoked together, or paired up two very disparate concepts that of natural language, with its fuzzy meanings and ambiguities, which is very difficult to define in computational terms, and the much more algorithmically aligned notion of semantics, definitive definitions and such. Many words are ambiguous, the team says, and contain several possible meanings or embody numerous concepts.
For example, tables can be various different items of furniture but we also have periodic tables, water tables, html web page tables, dissecting tables and times tables…the natural language is multifarious and even a definition that a computer might use would require multiple definitions. An example of where such ambiguity has been used creatively is in the famous physical wooden table constructed to display the chemical elements in their familiar format after the Mendelevian concept of the periodic table. Who knows what creative expressions might emerge from a collision of dissecting tables and times tables or the various other combinations? Such incongruities often underpin humor, as with the periodic table that might double as a dinner table, but also give rise to technological developments such as “table-type” computer systems, such as Microsoft’s Surface. Add a little “t” for a tablet and are we talking tablets of stone, iPads, medication or something else?
The “Syzygy Surfer” – a creative search engine – is currently being developed by the team for the open web.
Hendler J. & Hugill A. (2013). The syzygy surfer: (Ab)using the semantic web to inspire creativity, International Journal of Creative Computing, 1 (1) 20. DOI: 10.1504/IJCRC.2013.056926
Tabling a new concept in creative search is a post from: David Bradley's Science Spot
via Science Spot http://sciencespot.co.uk/tabling-a-new-concept-in-creative-search.html
But, focus isn’t everything, the original notion of surfing the internet and thence the web as about the serendipitous stumbling upon something of interest, something that was not necessarily what you were originally after. The emergence of sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit allowed other people to share with you their finds accidental or otherwise and then web 2.0 with its spotlight shining brightly on social has taken that to a whole new level with the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and many others. Indeed, it is almost as if the old-school search engine that spiders and indexes sites without personal context is almost redundant.
Now, James Hendler of the Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, New York, USA, working with Andrew Hugill of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, in Leicester, UK, hope to turn the notion of a focused search engine on its head to instill in the search process an element of creative expression that was inherent to the early web. They hope that they can reinvigorate search, not by making it more focused with algorithmic updates and slurpier spiders but by reintroducing the serendipitous, reducing the impact of the social collation and curation. With their approach they want to exploit the precision of semantic web technologies by combining them with the ambiguity of natural language.
Hendler and Hugill talk of the “syzygy surfer”. Syzygy, from the Greek meaning “yoked together”. In their concept they have yoked together, or paired up two very disparate concepts that of natural language, with its fuzzy meanings and ambiguities, which is very difficult to define in computational terms, and the much more algorithmically aligned notion of semantics, definitive definitions and such. Many words are ambiguous, the team says, and contain several possible meanings or embody numerous concepts.
For example, tables can be various different items of furniture but we also have periodic tables, water tables, html web page tables, dissecting tables and times tables…the natural language is multifarious and even a definition that a computer might use would require multiple definitions. An example of where such ambiguity has been used creatively is in the famous physical wooden table constructed to display the chemical elements in their familiar format after the Mendelevian concept of the periodic table. Who knows what creative expressions might emerge from a collision of dissecting tables and times tables or the various other combinations? Such incongruities often underpin humor, as with the periodic table that might double as a dinner table, but also give rise to technological developments such as “table-type” computer systems, such as Microsoft’s Surface. Add a little “t” for a tablet and are we talking tablets of stone, iPads, medication or something else?
The “Syzygy Surfer” – a creative search engine – is currently being developed by the team for the open web.
Hendler J. & Hugill A. (2013). The syzygy surfer: (Ab)using the semantic web to inspire creativity, International Journal of Creative Computing, 1 (1) 20. DOI: 10.1504/IJCRC.2013.056926 Tabling a new concept in creative search is a post from: David Bradley's Science Spot
via Science Spot http://sciencespot.co.uk/tabling-a-new-concept-in-creative-search.html
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