New endeavors aim to build a better Internet

Bryn Nelson Columnist

How do computers know what users really want when they ask for a concise hotel review, a way to kill bacteria or a picture labeled “breakfast” in Arabic? To the annoyance of Internet surfers adrift on oceans of online information, computers often don’t have a clue, even with the compendium of collective wisdom often referred to as Web 2.0.

University of Washington computer scientist and search engine pioneer Oren Etzioni is hoping to make today’s “dumb” computers far more consumer-friendly. As part of a larger push in the field, his latest projects are providing a sneak preview of how online applications might look in a more intuitive Web 3.0 of the not-so-distant future.

“I think that right now, there is the expectation that people will do a lot of the work,” Etzioni said. “The Web is cool, but to get something done like set up a vacation in Italy or even decide when’s the right time to buy your airline ticket to get the right price, it actually demands quite a bit of manual labor.”

Shifting the work to the machine
Web 2.0, Etzioni said, is about sharing information through “the wisdom of the crowds” and distributing labor across a large workforce, as sites like Wikipedia and Flickr have done.  World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has envisioned the “Semantic Web” as a key part of the next phase, in which all the stored knowledge can be converted to data that is easily retrieved, processed and integrated into a wide range of new applications. “Web 3.0 is trying to push more and more of that labor to the machine,” Etzioni said, “so that the machine can do the work for you.”

Among the crop of new endeavors aiming toward that goal is the University of Washington’s KnowItAll, led by Etzioni.  “The idea is to take every sentence on the Web and try to extract the basic facts from it,” he said. Subtle nuances aren’t likely to be captured by the project’s strategy of natural language processing, as it’s known, but clear assertions such as “Thomas Edison invented the phonograph” or “My hotel room was very nice” could be stored in a massive database that merges available information.

One application, called Opine, tries to capture the essence of potentially useful but often lengthy and redundant online reviews. “There are more and more reviews of more and more products online, and I find that I spend more and more time shopping, not less,” Etzioni said. “I get more information, but it takes forever.”

Opine is designed to save time by scanning reviews and extracting their key attributes, such as a hotel’s location and the staff’s friendliness. Like an automated version of the popular Zagat restaurant guide, the program can condense opinions into a summary, while allowing users to drill down for more information through hyperlinks. So far, the application is only a research prototype, though Etzioni hopes his group’s demonstration of its capabilities will encourage more development.

The still-in-development TextRunner application similarly permits queries on the topics of nutrition, general knowledge and the history of science by mining assertions contained in more than 100 million online pages. Even so, Etzioni says the prototype’s knowledge base covers just 1 percent of the current Web. “So you can imagine that if it’s run over the entire Web, which is what we want to do in the future, then it really can provide you with a wealth of information,” he said.

Etzioni brought his data-mining approach to the travel industry last year with the launch of Farecast. The start-up company uses data feeds and proprietary algorithms to comb the Web for the cheapest airfares and then predict whether a traveler should snap up a seat or wait for a better bargain.

“So it both gathers a huge amount of data and can offer analysis of the past and predictions for the future,” Etzioni said. “It will tell you: Is this a good time to buy? Are prices likely to go up or likely to go down?” Earlier this year, the site began predicting hotel prices as well.

Print this Email this Blog this  IM this

MORE FROM FRONTIERS

Moving toward more lifelike artificial limbs

Moving toward more lifelike artificial limbs Are we closer to a 'Matrix'-style world? Food enhancements prove palatable Virtual reality aids children with autism Swarm intelligence inspired by animals Could science end bad hair days? Technology driving motorists to distraction Got milk? Convert it into biofuel The future of biomedicine: virtual humans Electronic nose knows quality coffee   Add Frontiers headlines to your news reader: