A group at Middlebury College is working on open-source search tools that, rather than rely on keywords, attempt to deal with the query semantically. The Semantic Indexing Project goes beyond the “Ask Jeeves” (don’t you kind of miss him?) experience, attempting to automatically recognize synonyms and groupings related to the words in the query.
They are releasing a desktop search appliance in the near future, which may shed light on how far they have been able to progress. Combine this with good speech recognition, and we may see the Enterprise’s computer (the Next Generation version) not to far down the road.
from NewsForge
