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IBM opening the secret sauce for Web Fountain?

« H E linux :: open source :: email
posted 2005.08.08 Mon
Up above Silicon Valley, IBM has a big research facility. One of the big projects they are working on over there at Almaden is called Web Fountain. Think of it as Google on steroids. A search engine that can determine sentiment (can determine what ambiguous terms on pages actually mean and if the page refers to these terms in positive or negative light (meaning that if some blogger posted "Rails sucks!" Web Fountain could tell that it might actually mean that they are talking about the Ruby on Rails project and the blogger liked it, not that handrails make good vacuums)). So the news that IBM is open sourcing some search technology that uses "concepts and facts" instead of keywords might lead to some really cool applications. They call it UIMA (it might be different than the Web Fountain stuff (but it says that people from Almaden helped somewhere along UIMA's way)). Marketing folk would love any tool that can measure "buzz", which is something Web Fountain claims to do. You could see who was talking favorably about your company, and who isn't. (And you could repeat the drill for your competition). Governments would love it because ... let's just say it might help homeland security. But where's a practical application? Why isn't IBM taking over Google with its new toy? Maybe some inventive folk can hack together something really innovative with this new toolkit. Here's my idea, a blog aggregator that cuts out the cruft.... (when tags start getting gamed it will come in useful)

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comments (5)


1. a random John left...
2005.08.09 Tue 10:35 am

Years ago there was an article on Scientific American that described an IBM search engine that was similar to Google in many ways, but it distinguished between hub sites and oracle sites. Hub sites tended to have lots of links on a subject but not much content while oracles had specific content on a topic. By being able to make this distinction it was supposed to provide superior results. I have no idea what happened to this project. One of the odd aspects of IBM is that it is so big that even as an employee you are more likely to hear about IBM tech that is relevant to your job from a source outside of IBM rather than inside. Several times I read about smart card stuff in the press months before anyone in IBM mentioned it.


2. Matt left...
2005.08.09 Tue 10:46 am

Yeah, but in this case it appears that IBM isn't marketing Web Fountain that much. No one on the slashdot posting even mentioned Web Fountain (which was the first thing I thought when reading the title). Most references to Web Fountain (found via Google) are a year or two old. (Technorati though brings up quite a few more, so people are blogging about it....)


3. a random John left...
2005.08.10 Wed 6:57 am

I have a friend that is on web fountain. I'll ask him...


4. Matt left...
2005.08.19 Fri 8:06 pm

While at my parent's house I read Steven Levy's comments on how to know what to market to generation Y in newsweek (pg 14, Aug 8 2005 issue). The following is a qoute:

To make full use of the bounty of information, there are highly sophisticated services with sophisticated digital diving rods. Umbria, for instance, claims to have developed algorithms that can detect the age and gender of bloggers and chatters by analyzing speech patterns and subject matter. And IBM's WebFountain, a product of its West Coast research arm, does text analysis on billions of documents, from blogs to trade journals. "if you know where to look, it's easy to find things," says IBM's Dan Gruhl. "but we can look everywhere."

Drinking from its data fountain, IBM can anticipate the popularity of rock starts and monitor the way people are reacting to prescription drugs. Recently, the WebFountain crew has been tracking blogs to predict which books would hit the online best-seller lists (it correctly predicted the U.S. success of the self-help book "What Not to Wear").