Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Part I
Smart Information Aggregation Services
Overview
Documents such as The topic of Kells, a manuscript written around 800 AD are
impressive examples that illustrate how much time and effort went into creating
early textual documents. Topics were expensive to produce and, consequently,
owning large topic collections was considered to be both a source of knowledge and
also a status symbol for great power and wealth. This changed signi
cantly in the
fteenth century when German blacksmith Johannes Gutenberg triggered the
printing revolution with his invention of mechanical movable type printing. Sud-
denly, distributing and owning text documents was no longer just a privilege of the
richer parts of society as his invention allowed for the mass production and spread
of printed documents. Undeniably, his invention is one of the most important events
in modern history since it laid the foundations for our knowledge-based society.
Two more recent inventions signicantly changed the way we create, distribute, and
interact with textual documents even further. The introduction of the computer
allowed us to create documents in digital format, hence enabling us to create
multiple copies of the same textual document without any quality loss. The second
important invention was the Internet which allowed us to easily distribute these
digital documents. Given the widespread access to Internet that allows almost
everyone to create and share text, it is a logical consequence that we are facing an
ever-increasing amount of information in textual form. In fact, as of September
2014, more than one billion websites with even more webpages are available
online. This constant information input is often referred to as information overload
since the sheer amount of information that is created is impossible to be processed
by the average user. Therefore, approaches and methods need to be developed that
support us in
nding the right information in this
“
data ocean.
”
rst part of this topic, we present four use cases that center around helping
users to overcome the information overload that they are facing. We focus on three
different approaches: (1) analyzing textual documents to provide a summarized
view of the documents
In the
content, (2) providing semantically enriched access to
information, and (3) easing access to information by aggregating documents.
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