Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Visual Summaries - Your Visual Knowledge Building Blocks


We are very busy. In real life situations we may not be able or willing to read and assess the full-text of articles and documents. The materials may be lengthy, we may have time restrictions or the initial query may have retrieved a poor set of documents.

Automated summarization of web pages and documents is one of very helpful applications that can be added to our bag of tools. The purpose of summarization is to provide a quick insight into what is the essence of the document without the time consuming effort of carefully reading the entire text.

Why are we appreciative of summaries?

When we talk about summarizing such well-known phrases come to mind:

  •  In short...
  •  In brief...
  •  In summary...
  •  To summarize...
  •  In a nutshell...
  •  To conclude...
  •  In conclusion...
  • The bottom line is...
  • To sum up...

We use these phrases to clearly communicate and signify what key points we are making. We want to to help our readers and listeners by giving them a clear and concise summary of what we have said or written.  In short, we want to make sure that we are well understood.

However, in the majority of  the materials we read there are no keywords and summaries provided. This is a case where automatic summarization, especially Visual Summarization is of great help.

Here is an example of a Visual Summary produced by WebSummarizer. The summary shows the keywords in order of relevance; this gives readers an instant table of contents by topics. The Short Summary provides the most important summaries in a clear visual manner.

Visual Summary to show keywords and the most important summaries - produced by WebSummarizer

In addition to summarization of single articles, summaries can be generated from knowledge bases. An example of a knowledge base is a Wikipedia Knowledge Base generated by WebSummarizer. Over 3 million Wikipedia articles are summarized and stored as a handy knowledge library. Over 5 million keywords are available to access about 30 million summaries. This gives users an extraordinary ability to benefit from  Wikipedia using visual knowledge maps.

Here is an example of a Visual Knowledge Map. In this case the summarization is used to discover related topics for "Solar System" based on the content of multiple articles related to the central topic. The Visual Knowledge Map is build on the fly. The related topics are handily extracted from the knowledge base. This is a very convenient way to brainstorm and  explore subject's context.


Visual Knowledge Map - generated from Wikipedia Knowledge Base by WebSummarizer


Knowledge bases sources

Adding knowledge bases can be done for variety of content sources. For example BlogSummarizer automatically generates knowledge bases for Blogger and WordPress blogs.

The application reads all the posts, generates summaries, generates knowledge bases and provides BlogSummarizer widgets so all blog readers gain access to the knowledge base.

BlogSummarizer widget - provides access to  the blog knowledge base

With the BlogSummarizer widget users simply selects any keyword to generate Visual Knowledge Maps and related summaries. Blog readers greatly benefit from exploring the blog content using the companion knowledge base.

In practice, almost any content source could be used for creating knowledge bases. Blogs, websites, digital libraries, corporate drives, content management, search engines, Intranets, RSS feeds are some of the examples of content sources for creation of knowledge bases.

Knowledge Base Sources 



Here is an example of a Visual Knowledge Base created by BlogSummarizer. The knowledge base source is Google Research blog


Visual Knowledge Base created by BlogSummarizer

The Visual Knowledge Map gives a clear and comprehensive overview of subjects in the blog that are strongly related to the central topic: Google.

The sooner we can see the key ideas the more informed we are. The contextual map provides GPS-like guide to follow the topics of interest to us. The Visual Summaries and Visual Knowledge Maps are valuable relevancy feedback about documents documents and knowledge bases.

You can try  WebSummarizer and BlogSummarizer  for free!


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About WebSummarizer:
WebSummarizer is a powerful text mining and visualization application.  It offers rapid summarization of web pages and documents, creation of personal and corporate knowledge bases

The summarization results are presented as: 
•   Visual Summaries
•   Visual Knowledge Maps
•   Tree Views (structured text)
•   Keywords Cloud, and
•   Visual Summaries and Visual Knowledge Maps can be exported to HTML, word editors and mind mapping applications. 

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.


VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents with WebSummarizer and BlogSummarizer.


BlogSummarizerWebSummarizer and WikiSummarizer are products of Context Discovery Inc.




1 comment:

  1. This post has been very well represented and the illustration has been carefully chosen so it will be easily to follow. You can also use article summarizer to be able to understand this fully.

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