[WikiEN-l] SmartWikiSearch, a similarity search engine for Wikipedia

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/22/2009 10:56:20 AM Pacific Daylight Time, 
dgerard at gmail.com writes:


> Because there is no need to determine what the meaning of
> the particular term or keyword is, the pages it returns generally deal
> with the same concept or concepts that you entered. For instance, if
> you enter "Flower" and "Bee", it will find pages where these two
> concepts overlap - those are pages about pollination.>>
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This seems big to me.
It's creating, in a mindless way, semantic relationships between keywords.

This has been thought about for a long time it seems, but no one has really 
solved the annoying issue of how to avoid most false positives.  I don't 
think you can avoid them all because English is so ambiguous but the use of 
cross-links is a major leap forward.

Very few people are going to link-up concepts that are basely minor, but 
scan all pages for the links highlights the semantic connetions between 
concepts.  You could even take it one step further, use the semantic web to "point 
out" semantic connections that are not directly obvious.  Such as a leap 
from beekeeper to honeycomb.  Try to do that using Google.  You get thousands 
of bad hits before you get the one good one.

Search for "Hillbillies" and "Movie", using a semantic web you get the 
exact hit you want.

W.J.