ALVIS: Superpeer semantic search engine

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 03.0543

Key words (English)

Knowledge technology; intelligent interfaces; digital content semantic; based search; machine learning peer-to-peer

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: 002068

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 6. Frame Research Programme - 1.2 Communications technologies

Short description (English)

See abstract

Further information (English)

Full name of research-institution/enterprise:
EPF Lausanne
School of Computer and Communication Sciences
Center for Global Computing IC - CGC

Abstract (English)

The project will conduct research in the design, use and interoperability of topic-specific search engines with the goal of developing an open source prototype of a distributed, semantic-based search engine. Existing search engines provide poor foundation for semantic web operations, and in search US companies such as Google are becoming monopolies, distorting the entire information landscape towards the US. Our approach is not the traditional Semantic Web approach with coded or semi automatically extracted metadata, but rather an engine that can build on content through automatic analysis. Linguistic processing will be inside the search engine and a probabilistic document model will provide a genuine evaluation of relevance, unavailable by current technology. This will facilitate semantic retrieval and incorporate pre-existing domain ontologies using facilities for import and maintenance. The distributed design will be based on exposing search objects as resources, and on using implicit and automatically generated semantics to distribute queries and merge results. Because semantic expressivity and interoperability are competing goals, developing a system that is both distributed and semantic-based is the key challenge:
research will involve both the statistical and linguistic format of semantic internals, and determining the extent to which the semantic internals are exposed at the interface. The consortium assembles a team of leading international researchers from the areas of peer-to-peer computing (P2P), information extraction and search, and probabilistic modelling together with some of Europe's leading SMEs. The combination of design goals, the distributed operation and open source development have been chosen to support incremental growth, low barrier to entry, and next generation knowledge services so it provides a foundation for European SMEs and be accepted internationally.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 03.0543