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.

Summaries in everyday life

The importance of summaries

The ability to write an effective summary might be one of the the most important writing skill you possess.

You need to be able to summarize to be effective at writing demanded by your work, schoolwork, and it is a vital part of note taking too.

To answer questions such as “what was the movie about?” “how did the game go?” and “what did I miss in class today?” you must be able to summarize.  Your questioner doesn't want to know every line and action in the movie, every play in the game, or every word from class;  the question asks you to select the important details and summarize them.  Similarly, when you summarize a reading you need to be able to find the important data and then present it as clearly and concisely as possible.

Many organizations employ people to read newspapers, social media, news feeds and summarize relevant stories and articles. The more concise the summary the better, yet if any major details are omitted the purpose of the summary is lost - its readers will be uninformed on key aspects of the news and may make critical errors as a result.

Summaries in everyday life

 If we look around it clearly visible that we are surrounded by summaries. In fact, a great deal of information we consume are summaries. We may think about the summaries as forms of advertisement where the purpose is to catch the attention and attract.

Let's have a look at some examples. Of course this list incomplete.

1. Headlines: summaries of newspaper articles  

 A headline's purpose is to quickly and briefly draw attention to the story. For journalists and editors a headline is to provide the center of the story, the beating heart of what the story is about.

2. Table of Contents: summary of a book, magazine  

Table of Content, is a list of the parts of a book or document organized in the order in which the parts appear. It is a list that provides a quick overview of what the reader is going to find in the content.

The Table of Contents usually includes the titles or descriptions of the first-level headers, such as chapter titles in longer works, and often includes second-level or section titles within the chapters as well, and occasionally even third-level titles.

3. Digest: summary of stories on the same topic  

A digest format provides a sampling of favorite articles on many subjects from various monthly magazines, often condensing and rewriting them, and then combing them for convenience into one magazine. Well known examples are Reader's Digest, Golf Digest, Consumers Digest, and various electronic mailing lists.

 

The importance of summaries - interactive diagram

4. Highlights: summary of an event (meeting, sport event, etc.) 

The purpose of a highlight is to provide an especially significant or interesting detail or phenomenon to draw reader's attention.

The importance of summaries - interactive diagram

  5.  Abstract: summary of a scientific paper  

An abstract is a concise summary of a research article, review, thesis, conference proceeding or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject or discipline, and is used to help the reader quickly understand the paper's purpose. An abstract always appears at the beginning of a manuscript.

It is the point-of-entry for any given academic paper or patent application. Abstracting and indexing services for various academic disciplines are aimed at compiling a body of literature for that particular subject.

 

 6. Bulletin: weather forecast, stock market, news  

There are physical bulletin boards, typically made out of cork to pin messages and advertisments. And there are electronic bulletin boards which serve the same purpose as a physical bulletin board.

The purpose is to provide brief information snippets and essential facts. The emphasis is on brevity and facts.

  

7. Biography: resume, obituary  

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. It entails more than basic facts (education, work, relationships, and death), a biography also portrays a subject's experience of these events.

A biography presents a subject's life story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experience, and may include an analysis of a subject's personality.

  8. Abridgment: of books 

Abridgement is a term defined as "shortening" or "condensing" and is most commonly used in reference to the act of reducing a written work, typically a book, into a shorter form.

A written work may be abridged to make it more accessible to a wider audience; for example, to make an adaptation of it as an audio book or a television show, to make a more convenient companion to an already established work, or to create a shorter reference version.

 

 9. Review: of books, music, plays 

A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product, a service or a company such as a movie, video game, musical composition, book, car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show.

In addition to a critical evaluation, reviewers may assign the work a rating to indicate its relative merit.

  10. Scale-downs: maps, thumbnails 

A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.

It is to give us a quick visual orientation. Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use thumbnails

  

11. Trailer: from film, speech, presentation  

A trailer or preview is an advertisement or a commercial for a feature film that will be exhibited in the future at a cinema. A book trailer is a video advertisement for a book which employs techniques similar to those of movie trailers. 

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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.

The Power of Visual Summary

As Internet users we spend a significant amount of time examining search engine results.

For each search results we must click through many links to briefly evaluate each for possible relevance to a particular information we need. Improving the efficiency of this tedious process directly benefits the users.

The standard practice is to provide 1 sentence textual summary snippet by the search engine.  Specifically, Google shows up to 156 characters (including spaces) of a page’s meta description tag.

Here is a typical example of a Google summarization snippet:

Google summarization snippet

We believe that this practice can be significantly enhanced by providing the ability to automatically generate a more detailed visual and textual summaries of web pages.

Visual summaries greatly increase the efficiency by which readers evaluate and use search engine results. For example, keywords in visual summaries allow users to instantly see the most significant content at once without searches.

This visual presentation of the most pertinent information is a tremendous time saver. 

Let's look at an example of a Visual Summary for the "coffee"search term generated by WebSummarizer:

Visual Summary example

 
Advantages of Visual Summary presentation:

• Visual summaries conveniently aggregate the most important information around the key ideas. This makes it very easy to examine summaries by keywords.

•  In addition there are 2 options: Short Summary and Full Summary. Both summaries provides the most relevant extracts for quick orientation.
  

•  Visual Summary format enforces readability and with the highlighted keywords enhances quick comprehension of the textual summary.

• Visual presentation enhances ability to remember. It pairs the visual presentation with structured outline to make it easy to reuse the information when creating new documents.

• Providing the ability to expand and collapse the Visual Summary branches gives users great freedom to zoom in only on the points of interest.

The Visual Summary presentation makes it easy to understand and remember the key information.

Here is the dynamic Visual Summary of the coffee Wikipedia article:

                               VISUAL  SUMMARY                           

 

  
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. ----------------------------------------------------------------   

 A bit of science

• Visual information presentation speeds up many tasks tremendously. We can get the gist of an image in 110 ms or less! (Coltheart, 1999)
• In that same 110 ms, we can read on average less than 1 word or skim two words. The average reader of English reads about 4.2 words per second and can skim or scan at roughly 17 words per second. (Chapman, 1993) 

References:

• Coltheart, V. (Ed.). (1999). Fleeting memories: Cognition of brief visual stimuli. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.).

• Chapman, A. (Ed.). (1993). Making sense: Teaching critical reading across the curriculum. New York: The College Board.).

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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