Some time ago there was some debate on the NGC4LIB mailing list about the ability of computers to allocate subject headings given the full text of a document. I don’t think the debate really went anywhere, but I made me think that it would be useful to write something on how computers were able to extract ‘meaning’ from documents. This has been sitting on my notional ‘to-do’ list that I should write a blog post on how search technology found ‘meaning’ in documents.
Last week, I saw via Brian Kelly that Emma Tonkin had written a report on Emerging technologies for learning, which while not going into very much depth, has a basic introduction to this topic – well worth a read for this, and for the rest of the article which covers the ‘Semantic Web’ and related issues.