Keynote 1 MDM 2009 Semantics on the Web: How Do We Get There?
Raghu Ramakrishnan · 2009
It is becoming increasingly clear that the next generation of web search and advertising will rely on a deeper understanding of user intent and task modeling, and a correspondingly richer interpretation of content on the web. This should also facilitate better selection and presentation of results on mobile devices. How we get there, in particular, how we understand web content in richer terms than bags of words and links, is a wide open and fascinating question. I will discuss some of the options here, and look closely at the role that information extraction can play. Biography Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, and is a Research Fellow, heading the Web Information Management group in Yahoo! Research. He is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (on leave), and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq. Ramakrishnan's research is in the area of database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization, and web-scale data management, and has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems and the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Testof-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text Database Management Systems (with Johannes Gehrke).