1. semantic digital research librarian services chuck rehberg, chief scientist, semantic insights...
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Semantic Digital Research Librarian Services
Chuck Rehberg, Chief Scientist, Semantic Insights
October 11, 2006
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Semantic Insights
Semantic Insights is a small privately owned company committed to delivering semantics-based information products that extract and present semantic content from unstructured and semi-structured sources to meet a wide range of general and enterprise-specific needs.
Our solutions scale to handle the demanding requirements of Semantic-based Research, Cataloging, and Reasoning, while remaining easy to understand and easy to use.
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Chuck Rehberg, Chief Technology Officer
As CTO at Trigent Software and Chief Scientist at Semantic Insights, Chuck Rehberg has developed patent-pending semantics, linguistics, and rules engine technologies that enable the effective delivery of business solutions. Chuck has more than twenty-five years of experience in the high-tech industry, developing leading-edge solutions in the areas of Information Modeling, Artificial Intelligence and AI-based configuration software.
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Value Proposition
• A system that leverages the knowledge of individuals from a growing community of institutions to provide faster, more thorough, more up-to-date, and more relevant information presented in a variety of easy to use report formats.
• A Digital Librarian Service providing customized individual Research Reports
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Searching the web to find information for your paper: 6 hours
Roaming the library looking for a journal, any journal: 3 hours
Getting to know your Hopkins librarians: priceless
There are some things Google can’t find. Ask your librarian, the ultimate search engine.
Taken from a Board in the Johns Hopkins Library;
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Sira Lite—The Research Librarian
Scenario
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Karen and Stanley are full-time reference librarians at a large university's main library. Each day, they handle a number of administrative tasks in addition to their primary job of helping students, professors, and the public find answers to their questions. As librarians, they know how to find information in any field, although they might not be experts in every subject. They both love their jobs because they enjoy helping library patrons discover answers to their questions as well as providing them with new information to help round out their research.
As senior reference librarians, Karen and Stanley receive urgent help requests often, such as students presenting broad research topics the day before their deadlines, and lawyers and doctors needing information immediately.
Lately, Stanley has put in a lot overtime, but the client requests just keep piling up. He notices that his colleague Phyllis has a clean desk and gets to go home at a reasonable hour…
Phyllis and Stanley are full-time reference librarians at a large university's main library. Each day, they handle a number of administrative tasks in addition to their primary job of helping students, professors, and the public find answers to their questions. As librarians, they know how to find information in any field, although they might not be experts in every subject. They both love their jobs because they enjoy helping library patrons discover answers to their questions as well as providing them with new information to help round out their research.
As senior reference librarians, Phyllis and Stanley receive urgent help requests often, such as students presenting broad research topics the day before their deadlines, and lawyers and doctors needing information immediately.
Lately, Stanley has put in a lot overtime, but the client requests just keep piling up. He notices that his colleague Phyllis has a clean desk and gets to go home at a reasonable hour…
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You know how Professor Wallace always assigns the same
papers every year about the history of witchcraft? Instead of doing the same
searches every time,I just call up my Sira Reading Style and alter it slightly to fit each student's
specific topic.
Phyllis, we both get the same number of requests, but you fill them so much faster. How do
you do it?
Who is Sira?
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Sira isn’t a who, it's an online research tool.
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Sure thing, it’s easy. Tell me about a common
question you’ve seen a few times lately.
Can you show me how Sira works?
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OK, we’ll go to the Sira site and see if anyone else has created a research process
about autism. Instead of doing a lot of keyword searching and getting everything and its mother
and more on this topic, Sira can give you a succinct report on what you need. It makes it much easier
to choose where to go from there.
Well, I’ve had several people ask me about autism. I ran a Google search, but I’ve had to sift through lots of pages that have the same
information or that are completely irrelevant.
That’s taking a lot of my time.
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It looks like another librarian, someone named Fred* in New Jersey,
set up a Reading Style on this. He says that he has a child with autism and has
been working with experts for years.
* We will show you how to do it when there is no “Fred”
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Fred knows a lot about autism, but it isn’t that hard to create your
own “Reading Style.” Just select a few typical sources and highlight the key
items that are important to you.
Wow! Fred sounds like someone I should talk to. What is a Reading Style?
What do you mean by setting one up?
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Even better, we can get areport based on Fred’s ideas using
the most recent and extendedInformation available.
Are you telling me we can take advantage of Fred’s experience without calling
him up and bothering him?
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Yes, we can take what Fred found important and look over
a lot more literature, books, Internet, scholarly articles and so forth.
Really???
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Sure. First, lets focus theresults by posing a question.
Sounds great. Can we give it a try?
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I will put the question, ‘Are there any cures or treatments
for Autism?’
Well, a lot of people have come in who would like to know if there is a cure for autism and what
interventions are recommended.
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Should I come back later?
Well, the first time SIRA reads a corpus it could take anywhere from
4 minutes to 4 hours, depending on how manydocuments we tell it to read. Lets haveSIRA read the top 100 search hits. That
should take just a few minutes.
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Awesome!
Lots of good stuff here. I see there are differences of opinion.
There are links to the sources soyou can decide for yourself.
Minutes Later…Here’s your report!
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No problem. SIRA can also give you a report with
sections and references organized in chronological order. We can also pose
different questions without re-reading all of those documents. A revised report
takes just a minute or two.
What if I want to know the latest thinking?
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Yes. Thanks to SIRAand Fred’s Reading and
Reporting Styles.
Wow! Look at this report. What a great start! It even included a bibliography for
me automatically!
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Service Delivery using Sira Lite
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Sira Lite
• Web-based interface that manages research activities:
– Find Predefined Research Processes
– Create your own Research Processes
– Select a Research Process and “Do It!”
– Monitor the Status of your Research Jobs
– Examine and Refine your Results
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Sira Lite – Home Screen (Pre-login)
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Without Logging in…
You can:
•Run processes shared with everyone
•Create and Save Reports to local machine
You can’t:
•Access Peer-shared processes and reports
•Save processes
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Sira Lite – Home Screen after login
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Sira Lite – Research Job Status
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Sira Lite – Showing what it can do
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You can use Sira Lite to refine pre-existing Research Processes
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Research Processes have 5 parts
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Sira Lite shown with all steps opened up
2. Select Sources
1. Edit Process Description
3. Select Report Styles
4. Refine/Focus your Report
5. Schedule your Report
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User can edit the Research Process title and description
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User can search public sources of private sources if they have access
or
specify a single document or a whole corpus, local or remote
and
specify how deep to follow links
A user can also specify ‘get user input’ and add help text. For shared processes in particular, this makes it easier for novice users to refine their research without being overwhelmed by the edit process screen. When they hit ‘Do It’ pop-up windows will come up for steps in the process that will benefit from input.
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User can select from pre-built Reading, Writing, and Report Styles [created in Sira Client]
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User can pose questions that will refine the Report results
Reports can be created one-off, regularly scheduled, or run continuously [and output as a dynamic web page]
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When you are ready, just select aResearch Processand “Do It!”
No. Not the “George Bush Diet Report”, Rather…
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Et voila!The finished Report can be saved to the local machine in a useful format, such as an Acrobat PDF or MS-Word DOC
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Building a Semantic Research Service
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Vision
• Who is it for?– Directly benefits anyone doing research based on digital
print media
• What is digital research librarian services?– A premium service for creating semantic-based research
reports that contain only the information of interest
• How is this different?– Takes advantage of a growing body of shared general
and topic-specific knowledge
• Where is the payoff?– Faster, more thorough, more up-to-date, and more
relevant information presented in a variety of easy to use report formats
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Building a Semantic Research Service
TRAIN
READ
REPORTSELECT
WRITE
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Train
Identify Training Documents
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Train
Importing Taxonomies, etc.
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Train
Training the Reader
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Read
Reading the Corpus
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Select
Review and Refine the Conceptionary
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Wash, Rinse, Repeat
• Read again• Add more training documents• More concepts, relationships, events,
training material etc.
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Write
Train a Report Format*
• Technical Article
• Magazine Article
• Glossary
• Etc.
*Ask me about training Writing Styles
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Report
Output a document
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The Closing Thoughts
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Call to Action
• The Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICOP) pilot project: forming now and seeking participants.
• What are the requirements for 2006Q4?
• An exploration of how to create and deploy digital research services 2007Q1.
• Interested? contact Mills Davis, co-chair SICOP, or Barry Grushkin, Client Manager, SI.
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