The Role of Context in Social Semantic Search and Decision Making

摘要

This paper is based on my Keynote Address at the Tools with AI conference on November 4, 2013. The talk focussed on some factors used to determine a user's context - those attributes, both tacit and explicit, which help to ascertain a user's intensions for a search request in order to make a decision. I also explored how social semantic search can assist in guiding the decision process, especially when the decision is of a personal nature, for example, in decisions involving health care, where there may be a number of avenues to pursue. I focussed on our patented technology exemplified by the Knowledge Sifter system, and an application called Personal Health Explorer (PHE), a semantic recommender system that allows an individual to perform semantic search and discovery related to conditions and diseases contained in his personal health record (PHR). The PHE system consults authoritative ontologies and reputable information sources to provide semantically enhanced authoritative recommendations that can be stored in the individual's (PHR) for further research and consultation. The PHE is implemented using the Knowledge Sifter agent-based framework and Microsoft's Health Vault.