Finding “facts” (without scanning millions of documents)

The new version of Ontopedia PSI server is out. There are several interesting features in this release. We introduced auto-reification of all assertions, “everything is a subject” now. In the new version, preferable and recommended way to model web resources is to model them as first class “subjects”. Another interesting feature is ability to search for ‘facts’ related to various subjects.

Every assertion created in Ontopedia’s knowledge map is automatically reified as a ‘subject’. Starting from the moment of ‘creation’, assertion-based PSIs have a regular ‘life cycle’. Users can change PSI default name, description. It is also possible to deprecate PSIs and introduce new PSIs for the same subject. Of course, users can make assertions about other assertions. This feature is quite helpful for modeling changes in time (combined with time interval scoping), for example.

Speaking about modeling resources on the web, we continue to support URI-based properties/occurrences, but main modeling practice moving forward is based on creation of explicit subjects for web resources and using associations for connecting resources and other subjects. Ontopedia’s generic user interface will be optimized in next releases to support dual nature of web resources (as “subjects” and “links”).

Next feature is related to improving ‘findability’. I think that in many cases we are looking for ‘facts’, not documents, so we try to do the first step in providing direct access to ‘facts’ collected in Ontopedia’s knowledge map. We use basic faceted search/navigation with three main facets: ‘Concepts’, ‘Web Resources’, and ‘Assertions’. For example, if we type ‘apple’ in Ontopedia’s search box, we can find some information items in all three tabs on the front search page. The most interesting tab is probably ‘Assertions’. This tab provides direct access to facts which include reference to ‘apple’. Future versions of ‘Assertions’ tab will include additional facets which will allow to ‘slice and dice’ assertions.

With this new feature, our goal is to demonstrate that Subject-centric computing can change ‘search paradigm’ by providing direct, reliable access to ‘facts’. Of course, it will take lots of efforts to make this approach scalable. But recent enhancements in commercial and open source faceted search engines, achievements in creating “knowledge maps”/”smart indices ” make me believe that we are not that far from ability to directly find ‘facts’ that we are interested in.