Free Desktop Political Research Software Appliance Unifies Information Access and Measures the Coherence Between Words, Phrases and Concepts
The developers of Readware technology (a semantic software infrastructure) have produced a downloadable software appliance. The "PI" short for "Political Informant" is surely a "must have" device for every political junky, critic or political pundit.
Gainesville, FL (PRWEB) July 31, 2004 --As the political season gets well underway, a great deal of political opinion and analysis is finding its way onto the Internet, and into the blogosphere as it tends to be called. How do people get at that information, compare it, consolidate it or even comprehend it? That was a question studied by researchers at the PEW Foundation after the last presidential election. They found that people had a hard time finding political information because a) political issues are complex; searching on political topics can be hard, and b) the information is not easily located on the Internet.
Sure, you can search for politics on Google and find a handful of sites on the first page; the ones with the word politics" in their address. That is pretty much a no-brainer. You then have to go to the sites and navigate around to find the information you want. Oftentimes you must wade through waves of news, opinion and analysis that is already known or of little interest. You can search on the candidates and you are forced into the same situation. You get to the candidate's site, or somewhere for or against the candidate, then you have to scan and read until you find the relevant information.
If you want to find out, for example, what controversial positions or views a candidate has or has held, you pretty much have to know what position that is, in order to find any information about it. That is like saying that you have to already know the opinions you hold that are in conflict with the candidate's perspective. Not many people are that informed to begin with, so they pick an issue or topic and see what they find. That is a reason why search engines are not a lot of help in searching for political information.
Now comes the Political Informant that is built on Readware technology. The Political Informant is a Readware desktop appliance". When asked, Ken Ewell, one of the developer's of Readware technology said that: a Readware desktop appliance is a kind of software tool that links concepts and semantics with information indexing and open content harvesting savvy. It is a self-contained tool that needs no installation or local database. Plug it in to your computer (download it) and run it".
Readware works on any domain of knowledge" said Mr. Ewell. My partner, Dr. Tom Adi, and I produced the Political Informant to work with our internal spider, a web robot, to harvest the content from politically-oriented web sites. It means that people don't have to use the general purpose search engines to get political opinion from only the top rated media sites, they can use Readware's semantics and coherence measures to zero in on a unified index of political news, facts and informed opinion, wherever it may be on the Internet". We asked Mr. Ewell what he meant by coherence measures:"
Coherence measures are new to search technology. We know this because we invented and patented them", said Mr. Ewell. He continued; a lot of computer people are talking about semantics now. Nearly everyone sees semantics at the foundation of future computing models.
Most people have heard about the semantic web of the future. Dr. Adi and I began developing our ideas of semantics in the early 1980s, so we have had a lot of time to refine them. Readware was first used for text indexing in the early 1990s. We have learned that the search for meaning is not simply a matter of semantics. If semantics is the meaning or significance of a thing, then that meaning is not fixed at all. It oscillates and changes, sometimes ever-so-slightly. That oscillation" is governed by principles of coherence and stability. The coherence emerges from the stability and aesthetics of the arrangements of the elements representing a matter and its affairs. All that can be mathematically defined in a very precise way".
That may sound scientific though it is not meant to; it simply means what it says;" said Mr. Ewell. In matters of the mind, as in matters of the heart, our imaginations are not drawn by the things that happen or do not happen to appear or occur. Our attention is drawn to the harmony, symmetry and agreement, aesthetics and coherence, of those matters and states of affairs with the ideals we hold dear. When we look for love, we do not look or search for the word. We search for attractive and agreeable qualities.
If we want to know if the politic of the Democrats or the Republicans suit us the best, we do not go searching on the word polemic and some issue or topic, we read the polemics and opinions we find and decide if they cohere with our own ideas and opinions. That is how Readware works too; it calculates the amount of coherence between ideas input as a query and those in the texts and pages it reads; returning the most coherent information."
The Political Informant capitalizes on Readware functionality and the Internet to make it possible to more precisely locate and read a wealth of information about the actions and the qualities related to any of the named political candidate's in the U.S. elections. We hope that it helps people inform their opinion and also introduces them to the power available in Readware technology." said Mr. Ewell.
Information about the Readware Political Informant and where it can be downloaded is at http://www.readware.com/PIdl.htm
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