Showing posts with label Natural-Language Processing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natural-Language Processing. Show all posts

October 1, 2009

Conversational Computing and Enterprise Architecture

In MIT Technology Review, 19 September 2007, in an article entitled “Intelligent, Chatty Machines” by Kate Green, the author describes advances in computers’ ability to understand and respond to conversation. No, really.

Conversational computing works by using a “set of algorithms that convert strings of words into concepts and formulate a wordy response.”

The software product that enables this is called SILVIA and it works like this: “during a conversation, words are turned into conceptual data…SILVIA takes these concepts and mixes them with other conceptual data that's stored in short-term memory (information from the current discussion) or long-term memory (information that has been established through prior training sessions). Then SILVIA transforms the resulting concepts back into human language. Sometimes the software might trigger programs to run on a computer or perform another task required to interact with the outside world. For example, it could save a file, query a search engine, or send an e-mail.”

There has been much research done over the years in natural-language processing technology, but the results so far have not fully met expectations. Still, the time will come when we will be talking with our computers, just like on Star Trek, although I don’t know if we’ll be saying quite yet “Beam me up, Scotty.”

From an enterrpise architecture standpoint, the vision of conversational artificial intelligence is absolutely incredible. Imagine the potential! This would change the way we do everyday mission and business tasks. Everything would be affected from how we execute and support business functions and processes, and how we use, access, and share information. Just say the word and it’s done! Won't that be sweet?

I find it marvelous to imagine the day when we can fully engage with our technology on a more human level, such as through conversation. Then we can say goodbye to the keyboard and mouse, the way we did to the typewriter--which are just museum pieces now.


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November 5, 2007

Semantic Web and Enterprise Architecture

MIT Technology Review, 29 October 2007 in an article entitled, “The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream,” reports that a new free web-based tool called Twine (by Radar Networks) will change the way people organize information.

Semantic Web—“a concept, long discussed in research circles, that can be described as a sort of smart network of information in which data is tagged, sorted, and searchable.”

Clay Shirky, professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University says. “At its most basic, the Semantic Web is a campaign to tag information with extra metadata that makes it easier to search. At the upper limit, he says, it is about waiting for machines to become devastatingly intelligent.”

Twine—“Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received, and so on. Once Twine has some information, it starts to analyze it and automatically sort it into categories that include the people involved, concepts discussed, and places, organizations, and companies. This way, when a user is searching for something, she can have quick access to related information about it. Twine also uses elements of social networking so that a user has access to information collected by others in her network. All this creates a sort of ‘collective intelligence,’ says Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks.”

“Twine is also using extremely advanced machine learning and natural-language processing algorithms that give it capabilities beyond anything that relies on manual tagging. The tool uses a combination of natural-language algorithms to automatically extract key concepts from collections of text, essentially automatically tagging them.”

A recent article in the Economist described the Semantic Web as follows:

“The semantic web is so called because it aspires to make the web readable by machines as well as humans, by adding special tags, technically known as metadata, to its pages. Whereas the web today provides links between documents which humans read and extract meaning from, the semantic web aims to provide computers with the means to extract useful information from data accessible on the internet, be it on web pages, in calendars or inside spreadsheets.”

So whereas a tool like Google sifts through web pages based on search criteria and serves it up to humans to recognize what they are looking for, the Semantic Web actually connects related information and adds metadata that a computer can understand.
It’s like relational databases on steroids! And, with the intelligence built in to make meaning from the related information.

Like a human brain, the Semantic Web connects people, places, and events seamlessly into a unified and actionable ganglion of intelligence.

For User-centric EA, the Semantic Web could be a critical evolution in how enterprise architects analyze architecture information and come up with findings and recommendations for senior management. Using the Semantic Web, business and technology information (such as performance results, business function and activities, information requirements, applications systems, technologies, security, and human capital) would all be related, made machine readable, and automatically provide intelligence to decision-makers in terms of gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities—pinpointed without human intervention. Now that’s business intelligence for the CIO and other leaders, when and where they need it.

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