Link: Image Search Tools

Short post for useful list of image search tools posted here "7 Image Search Tools That Will Change Your Life". With the help of such tools you might be able to find images and not only search for it.....

Google Wave: backbone for real information collaboration

beside Microsoft still working on getting search on existing information done (last try http://www.bing.com/) Google tries to re-invent the creation, usage and collaboration of information with upcoming "Google Wave".

having a deeper look into the already available information the most interesting part of the design is that the complete architecture is based on hosted information transformation based on a group of humans and automated participants. the overall architecture looks clean and the demo provided here: http://www.youtube.com/v/v_UyVmITiYQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0 looks promising.

such kind of infrastructure has the capability to be used in all kind information centric workflows especially those happens in the "cloud". creation and further development of engineering artifacts from customer requirements to user stories to design documents and testing artifacts up to the usage of the same information in technical docs created for them. such workflow always requires a information object centric architecture and in addition collaboration feature sets.

we have to see if Wave will succeed, means if developer comunity contribute and use the existing extension points if so, i'm looking forward to see what can be done with this promising infrastructure.....

in my point of view the future of information goes away from document paradigm and end up in the a more message oriented paradigm where a group of people work on structured / semi-structured information objects (messages / topics) and assemble them in a final stage in each business workflow to a document, web-page, calculation sheet, ..... this means a document is "just one output for one audience" and describe just one usage of the information at a certain time.

in those days search is still essential but just as one way to navigate through the specific information pool and only if the hits are relevant for further usage (try to search for "Microsoft" on www.bing.com and see if the provided hits are relevant enough for you.....)

see also:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/wave
http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-features/

RDF support using yahoo's BOSS

yahoo added rdf/microformat support to their public search api called BOSS.
to understand how it works read http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/structureddata.html

this makes semantic sources if available usable in searches and therefore BOSS might be one real alternative to what the bg (big google) provides......

open source search engine: apache lucense & solr

Apache Lucene is one of the most interesting search api's in open source marketplace. it provides a powerful and pluggable interface to provide full test feature set to many java based application.
but Lucene is "only" an api not an application.

Apache Solr is on the other hand is an enterprise search server based on Apache Lucene. the feature set behind that solution is worth to look at, means Solr introducing features some commercial systems still missing. for example using standard enterprise search provided by MS within their Sharepoint product you wonder how less features are available there.....(maybe adding FAST into next generation of Sharepoint change that but thats another story),

since few month professional services for the mentioned open source products can be used from Lucid Imagination. providing support and integration work for open source products makes the usage for the products more useful for the enterprise.

if you have to provide advance "full text" feature double check the open source community before you invest in commercial variations....

additional semantic for existing information sources

how information enrichment works in real world showing two public use-cases based on different technologies:

• freebase
  "Freebase is an open, shared database that contains structured information on millions of topics in hundreds of categories. This information is compiled from open datasets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CIA World Fact Book, as well as contributions from our user community."
  
  this means that applications like freebase using already existing information and trying to add additional semantic to them based on combining and extracting information and context or in this case let user add additional semantics without modification to the source of the information.
  
  the tool thinkbase using freebase to provide a visual graph of information and corresponding link dependencies.
  
• MailMark using a xml database (Mark Logic) as backbone for building the application just on XQuery
  
  the semantic comes from information aggregation and combination. in this application no additional user interaction is possible
  

both examples are very useful and showing real world application which you might transform into your own information landscape.....

SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture)

"SMILA (SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture) is an extensible framework
for building search solutions to access unstructured information in the enterprise.
Besides providing essential infrastructure components and services, SMILA also delivers
ready-to-use add-on components, like connectors to most relevant data sources."

initiated by German based company empolis this project seems to be promising in solving one common problem while dealing with todays information overflow:

• identification and access to information relevant for a given business task / process
  
• integration of "unstructured" information in corresponding business process

used standards are of course complex and not really common used in many organizations right now but that might change in mid term....