Archive for the ‘HCIR’ Category
Unclassified + Unclassified = Classified
by Pete Bell
Hollywood has taught us that intelligence is secret: signal intelligence, like communications intercepts; imagery intelligence, like spy satellites; and human intelligence, like Mata Hari. But intelligence analysts say that many of their best sources aren’t secret, they’re open source (that’s “open source” as in publicly available, not as in free source code.) But feed it [...]
In: HCIR, Search/BI convergence
YAPL: Yet Another Pattern Library?
by Tony Russell-Rose
When I was a graduate student in Computer Science, many years ago, I was intrigued to discover the existence of a program called ‘YACC’. My curiosity was piqued not so much by the reputation of this program (for its use was widespread throughout academia), but simply the name: the acronym stood for ‘Yet Another Compiler [...]
Interview: Are Search Engines and Libraries Competitors?
by Pete Bell
Interviewer Brett Bonfield pulls off a tough balancing act in a new conversation with me and the founder of the web search engine DuckDuckGo, Gabe Weinberg: How do you ask the same set of questions of both a web search and search applications company? You can read the interview on the best-named library blog ever, [...]
TEDxBoston: The Future Of Search vs. Seeing The Future With Search
by Pete Bell
TEDx conferences, the local offshoots of TED, are more experimental in format than the classic TED talk. An innovation of TEDxBoston is the “Adventure” — an immersive trip that puts the big ideas of TED into the context of a physical location. This year, there were nearly two dozen, including a tour of Dean Kamen’s [...]
The Nobel Prize For Attention Spans
by Pete Bell
During a foreign crisis in the late 1960s, a government agency found itself starved for information. They reacted by upgrading their intelligence system, replacing their slow teletype machines with the latest technology, high-throughput line printers. The result? When the next crisis hit, they were even more starved for information.
That was one jumping-off point for Herb [...]
Cyborg BI
by Paul Sonderegger
Forget about agile BI or self-service BI. Think bigger: Cyborg BI.
In his recent Wired story “The Cyborg Advantage,” Clive Thompson writes about a “freestyle” chess tournament where any kind of entrant was allowed – human, machine or a combination of both. The winner was neither a grandmaster nor a supercomputer. It was a couple of [...]
Federation or Integration?
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Federated search is one of our most frequently requested features, and also one of the most misunderstood. Until recently, we’ve almost always advised against federation in favor of data integration — more on the exceptions below. But the lines between federation and integration have started to blur. Now that we’ve announced our eCommerce suite [...]
Faceted trust at Yelp, sorta
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Yelp, the local reviews crowd-sourcing site, is solving their woes with trust facets, sorta. (Note that Yelp is not an Endeca customer.)
Yelp has been in the news recently as the subject of class action lawsuits by businesses alleging that Yelp’s ad sales practices amount to extortion because the Yelp reps allegedly hint that they [...]
IEEE works! But what works?
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
A few weeks back, I wrote about the innovative faceted search UI at IEEE’s new IEEE Xplore Digital Library site. Qualitatively, it seemed like a particularly strong implementation, but now there are metrics. Yesterday, Gerry Grenier, IEEE’s director of publishing technologies, tweeted their first results:
Since our launch of Xplore 3.0 on Feb 13 we [...]
The tipping point: WhiteHouse.gov
by Vladimir Zelevinsky
Vladimir Zelevinsky
This will be a quick and happy post.
Each new technology has a tipping point (also see Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”): as everything else in nature, the technology adoption process follows the bell curve. Before the tipping point, it’s a climb; after, it’s a roller coaster.
I just noticed that we have passed this [...]
