February 17, 2009
Leveraging a Context for Information Access
“We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.”
Haldeman, Harold Robbins
The semantic web is getting more and more attention, but although the W3C tries to set-up a well-defined standard, its deployment is so far as speculative as is the one of Web 3.0 in general. On the other side, the search-engine industry increases regularly its ability to provide more comprehensive features going way beyond the simple projection of search keyword into an index of terms. While both sides tend to reach the same result (by restructuring the Internet versus by building a structure over raw data), these are not the two only possible approaches. Others try, for example, to leverage a context out of the search queries and the navigation behavior to better identify the user intent and therefore provide him with more interesting results.
