Hertzel's Emerging Tech Thoughts

Probase is an ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving. The primary goal is to enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication. It’s powered by a new graph database called Trinity, which is also a Microsoft Research project.

Compared with other knowledgebases, Probase is unique in two aspects. First, Probase has an extremely large concept/category space (2.7 million categories). As these concepts are automatically acquired from web pages authored by millions of users, it is probably true that they cover most concepts in our mental world (about worldly facts). Second, data in Probase, as knowledge in our mind, is not black or white. Probase quantifies the uncertainty. These serve as the priors and likelihoods that become the foundations of probabilistic reasoning in Probase. With this probabilistic Probase, we build several interesting applications, such as topic search, web table search and document understanding

Knowledge in Probase

But Probase is much more than a traditional ontology/taxonomy, which can be seen in three dimensions: the concept dimension,the data dimension, and the relationship dimension.

Concept Dimension

Probase is extremely rich in concepts. The core taxonomy alone contains about 2.7 million concepts. Probase has a much larger concept space than existing open domain taxonomies.

Data Dimension

Probase has a large data space. As an example,Cyc contains about two dozen painters, while Probase has close to 1,000 of them ordered by their popularity. Furthermore, we regard external data, such as the Web, Freebase, DBPedia, dictionaries and encyclopedias,IMDB, Amazon, etc., as evidences that can add to or modify the claims and beliefs in Probase. This means Probase is able to integrate information of varied quality from heterogeneous data sources.

Relationship Dimension

Probase also has a large relationship space. The most important relationships are the isA relationship (e.g. a painter is anartist), the part-whole relationship (e.g., engine is part of a car), and the similarity relationship (e.g., emerging markets, as a concept, is closely related to newly industrialized countries).

via Microsoft Research

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Information architects, web developers, UX designers and content writers may have different perspectives about content strategy. But, we all share a common passion for its importance. As content creators, we believe that content strategy is essential to the creation of any successful website from the onset of planning. Here are 20 lessons we learned from some of the industry’s leading experts on how content strategy plays a critical role in content marketing today:

1. Writing text online is no longer “just copywriting”. (@Halvorson)
2. Let’s reclaim the internet so when we type something in we get satisfying results. (@Halvorson)
3. Imagine if part of your strategy was to help your customers find what they are looking for. (@scottabel)
4. We deliver the wrong info to the wrong people in the wrong format. (@scottabel)
5. Content isn’t a phase in web development or redesign, it’s ongoing. Reverse how it is now. Design is a phase. (@jeffmacintyre)
6. Content strategy is a menu to order from – audit, plan, build, grow. (@jeffmacintyre)
7. Any content that you put on your website is a content promise to your customers in some way. (@juntajoe)
8. Create something remarkable. If your content isn’t the very best, why should your customers engage or share your brand story? (@juntajoe)
9. Traditional media is not at the heart of social media. It’s about one thing…content. (@Robert_Rose)
10. Fans/followers do not matter if you have no objectives set for them. (@Robert_Rose)
11. There is no semantic web without content and data. (@rlovinger)
12. Content strategy will make or break your process. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
13. We don’t plan time to create and edit content. We treat it like a black box. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
14. Is content missing in your project diagram? Most project outlines DO NOT include content. (@karenmcgane)
15. Good content isn’t magic. It takes planning and time. (@karenmcgane & @eaton)
16. Don’t shovel the old content into the new shiny site. (@mbloomstein)
17. Your deliverables will be that much richer with content strategy. (@mbloomstein)
18. Content strategy can help designers communicate – in less time and with less money and effort. (@mbloomstein)
19. Upfront content strategy actually preserves time and money for design. (@mbloomstein)
20. How can you budget by page count if you don’t know how many pages it will take to express the main points, capture a user’s profile, or complete interactions (@mbloomstein)

via Content Conversations

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When it comes to technology, blogging is an interesting discussion to host. Traditional blogs require hosting on a “traditional” blogging platform. Accordingly, we see that an overwhelming slice of bloggers host their blog on WordPress, followed by Blogger. It’s safe to assume that next year, we’ll see the rise of a new form of blogging platforms, those dedicated to simplicity with an emphasis on mobility, curation, instant presentation, and community.

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