Media and Publishing
Media and Publishing
Last Updated (Monday, 03 March 2008 22:22)
Media and Publishing
Another sector where SOPHIA's ground breaking technology is currently being applied is in the Media and publishing sectors. The Irish Times newspaper, the largest Irish broadsheet, are currently using SOPHIA in-house to search through their archive news articles.
Conventional search technologies return lists of individual results whose only common theme is that they contain the terms used in the query. Often tens of thousands of results are returned as a result of a query. Most of which are not relevant to the topic of what the user is looking for. In an attempt to allow users find the specific information they need these techniques allow them to filter the result sets using "meta data." Meta data is data which describes data. Dates, author names, Editors, publication date and publication name are all examples of meta data provided by these technologies to facilitate filtering of result sets that are very large.
This approach is reasonable if you know what it is you are looking for. That is, if you know when the information you are looking for was published or you know who the author was .. and so on. The problem with this is what if you don't know this information? What if you don't even know what the information is that you are looking for? Perhaps you have never seen it before. In this case filtering approaches are of little use and something more sophisticated is required.
SOPHIA provides this extra sophistication. Instead of receiving lots of initial results that are topically diverse and relying on you to know enough about them to filter that number down, SOPHIA presents you with the key themes that exist related to your query. This immediately allows you to understand the different contexts that exist with respect to your query, enabling you to focus on the theme(s) that meet your information needs. Only then does SOPHIA present you with topically focused information related to that theme(s). This removes the need for you to have the knowledge to be able to filter large amounts of information as all the data you are presented with is relevant to your needs. SOPHIA removes the point of effort from you to the technology base.