How To Use Semantics In A System

Transcription

1 Ricerca e classificazione documentale su basi dati per gli studi professionali The business case: Scarsi & Co. fabio.scarsi@scarsieco.it Alberto.Ciaramella@intellisemantic.com 1

2 Business Scenario: fierce competition the legal profession is a typical knowledge intensive industry. Critical have always been considered the skills of people involved and at the top of the market is common a strong specialization. 2

3 Business scenario: tacit vs. explicit knowledge in this framework, processes are still little industrialized and mainly based on the human factor. at the same time, the stream of new documents is significant and the use of data bases is absolutely pervasive. They can be more or less wide-ranging and sector specific as different document data base vendors are present on the market; for full coverage it is generally necessary to use multiple data bases and vendors. 3

4 Business scenario: cost of information retrieval an increasing amount of user time can be spent simply for finding information; also cost per time of these resources can be significant. 4

5 Business scenario: a possible revolutionary approach in our vision a big gain in efficiency can be got industrializing processes using emerging information technologies and collaborative tools. 5

6 Business process reengineering goals to integrate in the same system the access to different document data bases; to simplify the coverage of different sectors by the same business practice, if required; to simplify the expansion of the business practice to new sectors; to reduce the time spent for information retrieval; to delegate this task to less experienced people; to have a company customizable tool, in which the previous knowledge can be easily imported, new knowledge can be added and also transferred to newly hired or less experienced people. 6

7 Today configuration at Scarsi Portal 1 Portal 2 Teleport Client 1 Portal n Knowledge Base IntelliLegal Client 2 Portal n+1 Portal n+2 Portal n+n CD.ROM Internal Documents Client n 7 Scarsi & Co e Intellisemantic

8 IntelliLegal 8 IntelliLegal provides a powerful and user friendly interface supporting text search, results ranking (by date, by relevance) and refinement (by time frame, by source) an advanced and user friendly back office, which enables the system administrator to monitor the system quality in its life a semantic classification engine, originated by the research of the e-lite research group of the Politecnico di Torino, which semantically extends the solution a knowledge data base (Eurovoc) for verticalizing the solution to the legal documents: a different knowledge data base of course will verticalise the solution to a different sector

9 Semantics in Information Technology Semantics integrate a knowledge layer to the usual IT architecture in order to simulate a more intelligent behavior This knowledge layer specifies how to relate different names to the same concept and how to related different concepts (i.e. a cat is a mammal, a mammal is a animal) This knowledge layer verticalizes the solution for the domains it covers, hence a law related knowledge layer enables a more intelligent behavior for law documents, not for medicine documents, since it knows terms used in law, not in medicine The adoption of semantic solutions provides benefits in specific professional communities, as lawyers, engineers, doctors 9

10 Semantics today Semantic today is becoming more mature for IT solutions The book Semantic Web for dummies was published in 2009; this indicates a increasing awareness of these solutions Why this happened: Because the knowledge can be represented now in agreed formats (RDF, OWL) proposed by the W3C Because of the availability of tools for manipulating this knowledge and for transforming it into the agreed formats Because a increasing amount of good quality knowledge data bases, as Eurovoc, is now available in these agreed formats and can be easily integrated in the target application 10

11 Semantics and document search (1) 11 Most common solutions today do not yet use semantics; users find relevant documents by expressing their queries through metadata (author, date) and text strings The suitable inclusion of semantics enables faster searches and better results for the specific vertical covered by the knowledge data base integrated in the search engine. Better results mean: Reduce the number of relevant documents missed by the query (e.g. because they use a different term for the same concept) : this means to increase the recall Reduce the number of documents found, but not relevant (e.g. because they use the same term in a different context): this means to increase the precision

12 Semantics and document search (2) 12 The inclusion of semantics allows a better (semantic) interpretation of the query and the identification of most relevant topics in the document The semantic interpretation of the query allows: to search by concepts instead than by words to navigate beween related concepts (as more/less general than ) The automatic identification of most relevant topics enables: the refinement by topics of the initial list of documents found the identification of documents similar by topics Besides that, the proper inclusion of semantics simplifies the support of different languages, at least if the knowledge data base is multilingual too, as with Eurovoc

13 Conclusions 13 The business scenario in the profession requires efficient and specific search solutions the properly adoption of semantic technologies enables more efficient and specific solutions the availability of good quality and specific knowledge data bases is a prerequirement for semantic solutions some of these knowledge data bases are already in use, but the cooperation of professionals can help in extending their quality and generality other professions require also more efficient semantic search solutions: a vertical specific knowledge data base is needed also in these cases