Wikidata and Assistants

This was new and interesting to me, we looked at Wikidata early on, and there was little of interest to us. And it seemed that it was not being updated.   Now here a connection to assistants.   Fasinating details about how Wikidata is being used by Assistance.  Exploring some possible points of leverage. .

Inside the Alexa-Friendly World of Wikidata in Wired

HUMANS PRICKED BY info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, “Alexa!” Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can’t really speak the language.

Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of WIRED, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines—prose. That’s not a problem when you Google a question. Search engines don’t need to read; they find the most relevant web pages using patterns of links. But when you ask Google Assistant or one of its sistren for a celebrity’s date of birth or the location of a famous battle, it has to go find the answer. Yet no machine can easily or quickly skim meaning from the internet’s tangle of predicates, complements, sentences, and paragraphs. It requires a guide.

Wikidata, an obscure sister project to Wikipedia, aims to (eventually) represent everything in the universe in a way computers can understand. Maintained by an army of volunteers, the database has come to serve an essential yet mostly unheralded purpose as AI and voice recognition expand to every corner of digital life. “Language depends on knowing a lot of common sense, which computers don’t have access to,” says Denny Vrandečić, who founded Wikidata in 2012. A programmer and regular Wikipedia editor, Vrandečić saw the need for a place where humans and bots could share knowledge on more equal terms. ... "

Google Donates to Wikipedia

Makes sense for all the assistant players to do this, since keeping the information up to date, quickly accessible and maintained, is an important resource for assistants.     Also support for the future of Wikimedia, and how its data resources link to AI capabilities, is also important.

Google.org donates $2 million to Wikipedia’s parent org   By Megan Rose Dickey in Techcrunch

Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back.

Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, while the Endowment is the fund.

“Google and Wikimedia each play a unique role in an internet that works for and reflects the diversity of its users,” the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a blog post. “We look forward to continuing our work with Google in close collaboration with our communities around the world.”

In addition to the donation, Google and Wikipedia are expanding Project Tiger, an initiative to expand the content on Wikipedia into additional languages. The pilot program has already increased the amount of locally relevant content in 12 Indic languages. With the expansion, the goal is to include 10 more languages. .... " 

See also in the Wikimedia foundation:

Google and Wikimedia Foundation partner to increase knowledge equity online   By Lisa Gruwel Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia Adds Preview Hover

Wikipedia adds a hover over page preview capability to make navigation easier.  Been testing, a nice idea.  Lets you make somewhat fewer clicks while you browse.

Navigating through Wikipedia articles on desktop just got a lot easier    By Olga Vasileva, Wikimedia Foundation ... More usage and testing stats ... 

Page previews, deployed today, is one of the largest changes to desktop Wikipedia made in recent years. .... " 

Pingpad Building onto Slack for Knowledge Sharing

I see that long time connection Ross Mayfield, who we worked on in early corporate wiki days with Socialtext, is building onto Slack,   He writes:  "  .... We are about to launch Pingpad for Slack teams to capture shared knowledge, organize and act on it. Focusing your startup on a single platform is a big bet, and I thought I’d share our reasoning. ... " .   See much more in his post.   I plan to follow up.  See their Beta. 

Virtual Assistant for Documents

Fileee is an intelligent, personal assistant that automatically organizes all of your paper and digital documents in one system. It’s the new filing cabinet of the future, including personal assistance that recognizes the structures and information of your documents. ... "

This is probably the most important need for the knowledge worker.  Attempts like Google Intranet search, internal Wikies and Zakta have been used to address this.    Recently have seen examples of how Watson is being used at more depth, and most examples I have seen are also mostly about how to gather all your data, and external data, in all its forms, and apply it to specific contexts of need.

Wikipedia Using AI

Curating knowledge is an important aspect of knowledge management. I had wondered that the informal enrollment of editors for the Wikipedia could result in mixed results.  My few attempts led to quick discouragement.  
Once you build a system to understand its ideal structure, you could further use that method to automate some editing tasks.   I had already seen people using the taxonomy of the WP to structure their knowledge, this same AI could be used to manage external uses.

In Wired:  

" ....   Aaron Halfaker just built an artificial intelligence engine designed to automatically analyze changes to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. In crowdsourcing the creation of an encyclopedia, the not-for-profit website forever changed the way we get information. It’s among the ten most-visited sites on the Internet, and it has swept tomes like World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica into the dustbin of history. But it’s not without flaws. If anyone can edit Wikipedia, anyone can mistakenly add bogus information. And anyone can vandalize the site, purposefully adding bogus information. Halfaker, a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees Wikipedia, built his AI engine as a way of identifying such vandalism.  ... "

Forgetting Leads to Memory Holes in the Web

The EU rulings that you could ask for posts to be removed from Google web searches have led to more unusual and unexpected results.  Not that there are not already memory holes in the web. It seems that there are often external links in this blog that have gone bad.  Since items are so interconnected the The 'right to be forgotten', is often interlinked with useful information.  Watching the dynamics of this.

Rise of Wikidata

In Computing Now.  Introduced to the idea a year ago.  Worth a further look.  Using Wikipedia data for a centralized source of structured public data makes much sense. " ... Wikipedia was recently enhanced by a knowledge base: Wikidata. Thousands of volunteers who collect facts and their sources help grow and maintain Wikidata. Within only a few months, more than 16 million statements about more than 4 million items have been added to the project, ready to support Wikipedia and to enable and enrich many different types of external applications. ... " 

Probing the Hive Mind

To what degree does the Wikipedia act as a single brain? In Sciencenews: What implied rules underlie its operation as a useful resource?  I can see this as the future of all knowledge compendiums.  The Santa Fe Institute links to supporting paper and full article.

Google as Dictionary

Further convenience for those that use Google for search: " ... From now on, Google's word search results will include synonyms, sample sentences, and some description of the word's etymology. The more detailed results even include a chart demonstrating how commonly the word's been used over time. A small menu also gives you the chance to quickly translate the word into other languages, and you can tap on the microphone on the search bar to hear the results spoken aloud. .. "

Did a quick look at this and it works well.  You get the 'detailed' results by clicking on the down arrow in the center of the page.  The word usage plot over time is a further interesting feature.  As well as a word pronunciation function.

The only problem occurs when it is unclear if a word would naturally appear in either a dictionary or a encyclopedia.  You get more 'meta' information now if it's naturally a dictionary word.  A encyclopedia word drops through to articles from outside services like Wikipedia, which don't have the same information automatically.

Google Showcases in-Depth Articles

In Google Operating System:  An indication that Google is now showcasing long form articles.   We have become very used to small sized nuggets of information on the web, but we do also appreciate longer, full explanation examples.  That is part of the reason I would sometimes go directly to the Wikipedia.  The WP article often, but not always, would appear at the top of a search.  Is this a way of stealing away attention from Wikipedia as a primary knowledge source?  The post contains a number of good examples from searches.   Motivation further discussed.

Douglas Engelbart, Inventor of the Mouse, has Passed Away

We had the opportunity to meet with Doug Engelbart many times.  He told us of the difficult time he had getting people to appreciate the mouse user interface.  In later years he understood the difficult problems of enterprise knowledge management, and helped us with the redesign of ours.   He did not succeed broadly with those efforts, but his genius was welcome in our meetings.    He has passed away at 88.  His Wikipedia article is also instructive.  He will be missed in computing technology.

IMDB Again

Have used the Internet Movie Database or IMDB since shortly after its creation in 1990, and through its acquisition by Amazon in 1998 ... My research orientation, even for non work things,  has always made it an intriguing thing.   I have spend some time playing around with it on the ipad, and was surprised how much it had changed. Somehow I had been mostly using the Wikipedia for searching movies lately.  IMDB has been adapted well for the tablet and includes many more images of actors,  images of scenes from movies ... current movie reviews, showing locations and times ....  AND still has a depth of information way down to the really obscure ... no long existent .. media, including TV ...   one episode pilots in the 60s ... the depth and breadth is amazing.   Not too long ago you would have needed  a library of reference books to have this information, and those books would not be updated continuously.  We live in a new world .... Now I am back to IMBD for media research ....  A good example of knowledge management that could be useful for corporation knowledge.  Which we discussed, but never followed up on.  I have not heard IMDB discussed as an infrastructure for other knowledge bases for some time.

Wikipedia Change Map

In ArsTechnica:  An open source map of changes to the Wikipedia.  Had we been successful in building an enterprise wikipedia inspired  knowledge map, this could have show how innovation was being developed and spread.  It could have also indicated how knowledge was being used in the company.  But alas the effort was not successful.

Release of Geodata

The Geodata from Wikimedia is being released.   Thought this had been done before,  very useful for mobile. " ... The WikiMedia Foundation has added a new extension to MediaWiki, the foundation for Wikipedia, that adds geographic data for individual wiki articles. Aimed primarily at mobile users, GeoData will make finding information about your present location easy and fun. According to WikiMedia, GeoData aims to codify the common practice of adding geographic data to articles.... " 

Bar Code Inventor Dies

I worked with identification technology technologies for years.  Bar codes were a simple solution to a simple problem with wide ranging, complex applications ... They are still of much value ...

A colleague - correspondent writes:  I was very sad to read that inventor Norman Joseph Woodland died aged 91 on Sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-the-bar-code-dies-at-91.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20718362
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323297104578177502124093578.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Joseph_Woodland

His co-inventor Bernard Silver died young at the age of 38 in 1963 in an automobile accident:

http://www.adams1.com/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Silver
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/454.html

Research Mind Mapping

I have used IThoughtsHD for some time as a mind mapping tool.  The main reason for choosing it was that it was usable as an iPad App and could readily communicate with other concept mapping formats. Mind/Concept Mapping is an excellent application for tablets.  These are very useful for constructing a map of  a client process, presenting and editing.  Most recently IThoughtsHD  has added a way to extract topics from Wikipedia and other online resources to establish topics and gather descriptions via online research.    I have found it very useful to rapidly construct outlines for research.  A video demonstrating the approach.

Bing Links with Britannica

ComputerWorld reports: To provide thumbnail encyclopedic information based on search requests. This would be akin to the fact that Wikipedia hits often come up first on Google searches.  Promotes the Britannica's online resources.

Wikipedia and the University

Abstract of a case study:  it is still evolving, but the younger cadres of teachers and students see it as a viable tool.  Similar to the way any encyclopedia was used in the past, as an introductory, definitional tool for a topic.   Not for deeper research.

Wikipedia Page 1 Rank

For some time now it has been common to see Wikipedia results to come up on page 1 of a Google search. Search Engine Watch looks at a number of studies that have looked at this behavior, based upon the kind of searches used.