Jeff’s Live Nudes

So for those who don’t know, this summer, aside from working my usual IS&T job, I’m working with a couple eggheads over at qwobl.com.  It’s a brilliant new paradigm for information classification and search, and, like Wolfram|Alpha, delivers content, not just references.   Want to know the amount of calcium in a gallon of 2% milk?  How about the records of every AFC conference team from the 2008 season?  What about the name of that sexy guest actress playing the paraplegic on House last night?  Google will give you these answers, with a little bit of elbow grease.  But what if you could bypass the step of sifting through webpage content to find these answers?  In principle, shouldn’t data mining be able to solve the problem for you?

Welcome to the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee’s personal vision of the future of information retrieval and compatibility.  The idea: make information online quantizable and classifiable, and unleash the full potential of information automation.  By classifying information based on object-verb-subject relationships, we can construct an intuitive structure on which massive computation is viable.  I realize I’m being incredibly vague, as I’ve just begun to delve into the subject myself.

The power of the Qwobl search engine lies in the strength of the semantic web.  Data is scraped from sources on the web.  Data is converted into RDF form, which is then processed by NER algorithms.  Using this basis, one could retrieve any sort of information desired, without an inkling of human information processing.  A profound concept indeed.

Aside from Qwobl, I’ll be working on Kakeya, which you can read about in the subsequent article, and moonlighting at the help desk for a bit of cash, since I get next to nothing at the former jobs.  I’m both terribly excited and terribly nervous about my summer’s work, and I hope my gamble for experience before income will prove to be less of a blunder than I sometimes imagine it as.