Company|Dallas New Graphic
May 26th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
Wanted to share with you a cool new graphic for company|dallas, my coworking facility that’s now into its second week here in Richardson…
My obvious inspiration after the jump…
More SemWebDallas Meet-up Info
May 19th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
I’m pleased to announce that we’re going to have 5 excellent speakers at tomorrow’s first SemWebDallas meet-up. These include:
- Shion Deysarkar (80Legs)
- David Hagar (pure|discovery)
- Taylor Cohen (Sabre)
- Andy Hickl (Swingly)
- John Lehmann (Language Computer Corporation)
We’re going to focus on applications (and enabling technologies) that folks are building. David, John, and Taylor (and of course, myself) are all based here in DFW; Shion is coming all the way from Houston to tell us a little more about 80Legs and the exciting new platform they’re building there.
We’d love it if you’d RSVP over on Meetup, but there’s no obligation to do so. If you’d like to do so, do so here: http://www.meetup.com/Semantic-Web-Dallas/calendar/10406924/. More details after the jump.
First SemWebDallas Meetup
May 13th, 2009 / 1 Comment » / by admin
Swingly is sponsoring a meet-up for people interested in all things semantic — including the Semantic Web, semantic search, RDF / OWL, Web 3.0 applications and the like — to be held this Wednesday, May 20th (starting at 6 pm) at the brand new company | dallas coworking facility in Richardson.
We’re hoping that this meet-up will lead to the creation of our very own SemWebDallas group which will serve as a North Texas counterpoint to the very excellent SemWebAustin semantic web group. There’s a lot of excellent work being done in this space right here in DFW, and we thought it’d be a great opportunity for us to bring together some of the key stakeholders in our community.
The highlight of the evening will be a series of short (~10 minute), BarCamp-style talks from companies who are working with — or are developing — semantic technologies. We’re putting together an excellent line-up (coming soon), but there’s plenty of room for other speakers. Talks don’t have to be strictly “semantic”, either: if you’re building apps or technologies that make it possible to make sense of lots and lots of data, we’d love to hear from you, too. E-mail me at andy@swingly.com if you’re interested in joining the program.
RSVP? All the information you could ever want can be found here.
Oh, yeah — we’ll be showing off a sneak peek into the brand-new alpha version of Swingly to those who make it…
10 Things to Know About Swingly
April 30th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
Greetings to everyone who read about Swingly in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s excellent ReadWriteWeb article.
Here are 10 things you should know about Swingly:
10. Swingly is a mysterious (and unlaunched) Dallas, Texas-based semantic search company. We’re building a new type of search engine designed to help you find answers to your questions — wherever they can be found on the Internet.
9. We’re on Twitter. Follow us at @searchswingly. Follow Andy Hickl, our CEO (that’s me!), at @andyhickl. Follow our SETI@Home-style distributed processing platform, Swingly@Home, over at @swinglyathome.
8. We’re launching a public alpha late in May. No, you can’t see it now. You can see screenshots here and here, though.
7. Our public beta is slated to be released later in the summer. Want to know more? Want to take it out for a test drive? Email us at beta@swingly.com.
6. We think that it should be a search engine’s sworn duty to find the particular piece information that you’re looking for — and not drown you in search results.
5. No, we’re not out to kill Google. (Or anybody else, for that matter.) Traditional search is great at what it does: helping you find pages out on the WWW. We want to do something different: help you find the particular information you need, no matter whether it’s a word, a phrase, a sentence, or yes, even a bunch of pages.
4. We’re big fans of Language Computer Corporation, our parent company. They’ve been building some of the best Natural Language Processing software in the world for more than 10 years. They keep a low profile, but they’re on Twitter, too (@LgComputer).
3. Yes, we know: getting a search engine to answer everybody’s questions is wicked hard.
2. Yes, we’re still going through with it. We’ve got something special in mind. It involves billions upon billions of questions and answers, lots and lots of structured data, some really truly great natural language processing components, and a new search and indexing platform that we’re proud of. Oh, and plenty of moxie.
1. Why? Well, for starters, we think you deserve some answers.
Oh, heck: one more sneak peek
April 29th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
Got these forwarded to me from one of the Swingly devs hard at work on our first public-facing offering… it’s another couple of leaked screenshots. Savor it, while you can, folks — last ones for a while.
First Look: Swingly Alpha
April 27th, 2009 / 1,873 Comments » / by admin
A few of you have been pestering me for a sneak peek at Swingly’s upcoming Alpha release. While we’re not ready just yet to take the wraps off, I thought I’d post a couple of quickie screenshots to whet your (collective) appetites for insider information.
Swingly’s Alpha is going to give visitors a look into the billions of question-and-answer pairs that are stored in Swingly’s semantic index.
We’ve generated FAQs for the 3.5 million most popular “entities” (that’s people, places, things, locations, sports teams, pancake houses, adult film stars, grocery stores, Trans-Neptunian Objects, viruses, and the like…) that can be found out there on the Web.
Our Alpha isn’t a search engine. It’s designed to give a sense of exactly how deep our rabbit hole goes — but not necessarily satisfy your every need for information. And of course, when you’re dealing with billions upon billions of Q&A pairs — not every FAQ you run into will be particularly enlightening. Some will, some won’t.
While you won’t be able to search our index as part of the Alpha — we’re saving that for the Beta release (scheduled for later this summer) — you will be able to browse FAQs and even provide feedback on the Q&A pairs which you found most relevant (or most ridiculous).
Screenshots after the jump!
Guest Post: Hadoop & the Swingly Annotation Pipeline
April 22nd, 2009 / 104 Comments » / by admin
This post was contributed by Tobias Jungen (@toluju), one of the lead devs at Swingly and one of the architects building Swingly’s ingestion and annotation pipeline. His job? Coordinating the more than 1500 different types of semantic annotations that get run over the millions of documents that are ingested into the Swingly index each day.
Toby’s post explains how his group is answering the following question:
How can you run hundreds of memory intensive annotation tasks across billions of web documents to build a sweet semantic search engine before the sun goes nova?
The answer — and more details about Swingly’s annotation pipeline — can be found after the jump. Thanks, Toby, for the post! Read more…
Fortune: Using NLP to Create & Manage Health Records
April 21st, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
I was contacted by Anna Kattan from Fortune Magazine to talk a little about the role that natural language processing technologies will play in the healthcare industry in the years to come. You can read the entire article here.
Although Anna goes into detail into her excellent piece, I thought it’d be worthwhile to give a top-level overview of how one key technology — information extraction — could benefit the healthcare industry. The full story can be found after the jump.
Announcing: Company|Dallas
April 20th, 2009 / No Comments » / by admin
company|dallas is a brand-new coworking spot that my company is starting up for freelancers, startups, and anybody who needs a place to work. We provide the amenities, and a great community of techies, creatives, and other biz types. It’s a new addition to the growing coworking scene in DFW, which already includes the absolutely fabulous cohabitat and the coworking site run by the guys @ biggu.com.
We open up in mid-May in the Dallas Telecom Corridor, right off the 75 (Collins/Campbell) in Richardson. We’re also near the DART station (Arapaho Center, red line). Membership (which includes great perks) is $250 / month or $20 day.
3 NLP Technologies to Watch in Semantic Search Apps
April 15th, 2009 / 4 Comments » / by admin
Arun Radhakrishnan over at Search Engine Journal set the Twitter-sphere all a-buzz on Monday with his profile of 9 new semantic search engines that are looking to change the face of search. (For the record, the 9 included Hakia, Kosmix, Cognition, Lexxe, Exalead, Factbites, Swoogle, Sensebot, and Powerset. Helpful commenters also included pointers to Evri, DuckDuckGo, and Semote as well.)
Given that excellent introduction, I thought I’d contribute a short post on a couple of the natural language processing (NLP) technologies that are making these new kinds of search applications possible. (This is by no means a comprehensive list — nor is it an endorsement or repudiation of any particular approach to semantic search. )
So, without any further ado, here are 3 techs to watch:
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