OrcaTec

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Meaningz is scalable personalized information discovery. Meaningz recognizes that change happens and that there’s no such thing as a single version of the truth. Meaningz brings the wisdom of your personal crowd to deliver the most interesting, timely, meaningful, and useful information from your social network and from the web. Meaningz cuts through the crud and ambiguity of the Web to return targeted, timely, search results just for you.

Meaningz technology makes it practical to provide personalized search with no active input from the user beyond logging in and without the privacy issues inherent in monitoring and storing a user’s search history. With Meaningz there is no need for tagging, RDF, OWL, microformats or any other specialized markup. No need for elaborate user profiles, preselected web sites, user categorization, or to safeguard users’ search history. Meaningz extracts knowledge from your public social network and uses that knowledge to deliver accurate and timely responses to your queries.

Meaningz taps into your personal Zeitgeist to understand what you mean when you use a word. Language is dynamic. It changes constantly. New words are constantly appearing and old words change their meaning. A few years ago, “twitter” meant “the sound of a small bird,” “android” was “an anthropomorphic robot,” and the “iphone” did not exist. No manual process can scale to match this dynamic quality of language, but more importantly, language is personal.

Not everyone speaks English and the meanings of the words they use can vary a lot. A minister in the US is typically a member of the clergy. A minister in Europe is a member of the government. When talking to my neighbors, “VC” means “Ventura County.” When talking to my business associates or working online, “VC” means “venture capital.” To Google, it means “venture capital,” “Visteon Corp.,” Ultimate Frisbee uniforms, and “Virginia College.” Knowing my community allows Meaningz to know what I actually mean by VC.

How Meaningz is Different

Meaningz focuses on, well, MEANINGS. It does not require decades of work to develop ontologies or even minutes of work from users to set up. The meanings emerge from an automatic analysis of the user’s public online social network. It only takes a few minutes for Meaningz to add a new user and new meanings.

Meaningz is personal. Each person can get a unique perspective on the pages recommended by their network friends and can extend that perspective to the Web. There is no drudgery to setting up Meaningz—sign up, sign in, you’re done. The concepts it contains reflect the concepts currently used by a group of friends.

Meaningz is targeted. Users don’t have to choose what sense of a word they intend. Meaningz already knows. Meaningz matches the users’ interests without forcing them to fit into anyone’s preconceived idea of what your interests should be and without monitoring their search history.

Meaningz alerts the user to trending topics within his or her own community. You may or may not care that Bob Barker was on a wrestling show last night, but you probably do care about what your friends have been finding interesting. Hyper-local focus on you and your friends.

Meaningz is timely. Although it does not seek to display up-to-the-second Tweets, it is updated on a frequent schedule. Results are ordered by relevance rather than recency.

Meaningz is spam resistant. Because Meaningz’s relevance is computed based on the user’s community of friends. You choose your friends, you choose who can influence you and your search.

The OrcaTec Information Discovery Toolkit is used in electronic discovery, advertising applications, knowledge management, and Web Searching (www.truevert.com). Our project for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory using this toolkit was nominated for NASA software of the year.

The OrcaTec Information Discovery Toolkit is an easily deployed software appliance, which provides an integrated collection of information analysis and management services. Current modules include:

• Near Duplicate Clustering

• Semantic (concept) Search

• Language Identification

• Interesting Phrase Finder

• Email Threading

A software appliance is an application that is distributed with its own operating system and all systems needed to run and maintain it. It runs on commodity servers or virtual machines. The appliance includes its database and data management tools. It exposes its functionality through a RESTful XML or JSON API.