A Case For Knowledge Base Driven Information Mining – A WebSummarizer Use Case

We use terms like “knowledge economy” (Peter Drucker) , “knowledge as the fuel for innovation” (Nonaka) to emphasize the value we put on knowledge.

Putting knowledge to work requires tools enabling the gathering and structuring relevant information as factors driving innovation, creativity, and  invention.  In practice tools and techniques are tangible instruments of applying knowledge to solving real life challenges.

This is especially important in modern information society “where the creation, distribution, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity”. (see here)

Both concepts - knowledge economy and information society - are closely related by its emphasis on increasing technological capacity to store,  analyze and compute information as bases for data mining and discovery.

In our daily practice we can see the that a direct impact of knowledge economy is measurable in the explosion of scientific and medical discoveries, technological  patents and rapid research progress.

Information overload and information wealth

On a practical human scale we are facing information overload – a condition described as “the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information.” (see here)

Clay Shirky operationally defined information overload rather as a case of filter failure in his famous talk at  Web 2.0 Expo NY:  "It's Not InformationOverload. It's Filter Failure"

In reality we should rejoice and take advantage of the fact that we have unprecedented in the human history access to information wealth. And to cope better with information wealth we need automated  smart tools allowing us to take advantage of this unparalleled access to information.

Let’s take a practical case from our daily work. Research tells us that we spend almost  one third of our time searching for relevant information.  Of course finding relevant data is critical to our productivity but  spending one third of our productive time on searches leaves not much time on the actual creative usage of our findings.

On one hand we have the challenges with large data sources that includes capture, storage, and search of relevant information and then we need effective tools for sharing, analysis, and visualization. On the other hand all of us can benefit from knowledge mining tools allowing us to concentrate on applying knowledge instead of using our precious time on inefficient searches. 

Knowledge Base – practical tool set for discovery

In short knowledge base allows us to see how different pieces of information are inter-connected! This is the principle of how the Web works: it is all about linking web pages.

However, what is even more useful is to link the topics that are discussed on those web pages with related topics on other pages. This allows are to purely look at the relationships as a family of connections without the distraction of seeing the the unrelated information.  This allows us to focus on the topic in context of its relationship, correlation, influence, meaning, to other topics and contexts. Such information filters help with understanding and conveniently provide facts and insights to form our judgment and decisions.

Here is an example of Visual Knowledge Map. The topic is "Learning". The sources for generating the Visual Knowledge Map are numerous articles in Wikipedia that address the subject of learning in rich context. The Visual Knowledge Map was generated by WebSummarizer.

The Visual Knowledge Map is interactive. You can click on the + and - signs to zoom in and zoom out.

 

Visual Knowledge Map - Topic: Learning - Generated by WebSummarizer from Wikipedia knowledge base

Visual Knowledge Map - Topic: Learning - Generated by WebSummarizer from Wikipedia knowledge base

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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.

BlogSummarizer, WebSummarizer and WikiSummarizer are products of Context Discovery Inc.

Pictorial Knowledge Presentation - Text Summarization and Visualization Connected

In this post  I will present two powerful technologies for summarizing and visualizing information rolled out into a single web application. The result is a Visual Summary which is a very practical pictorial tool for presenting and recording knowledge.

Visual Summary - combining automatic summarization with automatic visualization

In our daily work, learning, communication we frequently summarize what we need to convey and very often present our information using graphical means to vividly express our thoughts. In this sense summarization and visualization are important techniques that we apply to effectively communicate, teach, explain, clarify, and inform.

As a human processes the summarization and visualization are time consuming and very demanding given our daily significant reading load.  It stands to reason that automating both summarization and visualization would rapidly increase the number of web pages and documents that we could summarize and visualize. And if such a system would produce an instant summary and at the same time present it also as a visual diagram, an interactive diagram, this would be a highly beneficial application. 

And indeed, Visual Summary by WebSummarizer offers such a solution.

WebSummarizer Components

Why is this significant?

The single impact of summarization is to establish a focus for our mind.

Not all information is equal:  some of it clearly is more important than the rest so making the distinction and providing relevance ranking is a vital feedback helping us with filtering and evaluating information.

Visual representation of information is useful because it opens up the way we think about data. It helps us with revealing hidden patterns, and highlighting connections between elements. And helps us remembering the details.

The main idea is the most important concept - the focus - is represented at the root of the visual summary.

Together, summarization and visualization, comprise a highly engaging, crystal-clear and dynamic way to present, communicate and understand complex information.

Visual Summary Elements

Combining the ability to integrate the Visual Summary with host of other systems makes the application a powerful companion for exploring the wealth of information available to us on our computers, tablets and smart phones.  

For the record, here are some general descriptions of automatic summarization and automatic visualization:

• Automatic summarization is the creation of a shortened version of a text by a computer program. The product of this procedure still contains the most important points of the original text.

•  Automatic text visualization aggregates the most important information around the key ideas and presents the information as clear preferably interactive diagram. This presentation makes it easy to understand, view and remember the key information. 

 Knowledge Bases and Visual Summaries

We can imagine that accessing collections of summaries offers much richer information choices than looking just at a summary of a single document. Further, we can imagine that aggregating collections of  summaries on many topics would provide a very fertile ground to seriously engage into knowledge discovery. 

In this scenario, we have a smartly organized repository of summaries indexed by topics. The topics are linked to the relevant summaries and to their sources so we always know where the information is coming from and what is the context of the information. Also, the convenient zoom-in feature allows to examine information in more details by navigating the dynamic Visual Summary.

The ultimate goal of creating and using knowledge bases is to speed up our understanding and reasoning about the contents of large and complex text collections. Such text collections are blogs, websites, newspapers, search engine results, digital libraries, social media, corporate documents, news feeds, etc.


Getting a knowledge snapshot of the key topics and the context helps with decision making, evaluations, recommendations and learning.

Creating Knowledge Libraries with WebSummarizer

It is quite fast and practical process to automatically summarize and aggregate the summaries into knowledge bases. WebSummarizer provides Wikipedia Knowledge Base which holds summaries of over 3 million articles indexed by almost 5 million keywords with an instant access to 30 million summaries.

The following two examples provide real Visual Summaries generated by WebSummarizer. You can open each of the topics and examine the context.

Publishing of the visual summaries in blogs and websites is as simple as inserting a YouTube video.

                               VISUAL  SUMMARY                              

This an interactive Visual Summary of Wikipedia article about coffee

 

 

To navigate the Visual Summary:  
* click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map  
* or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons. 

                               KNOWLEDGE BASE                           

This an interactive Visual Summary created from Wikipedia Knowledge base - 30 top ranked articles with the keyword "coffee" are presented

 

 

To navigate the Visual Summary:  
* click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map  
* or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons.

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About WebSummarizer  
 

WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

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

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer

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