Friday, August 1, 2008

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

As a Webmining Anaylst pursuing my PHd. degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Louisville [1], recently, I bumped into a very interesting aspect: "The theory of Syntax".
Let me first give you some insight about me, I started my PhD. in 2004 and I finished my coursework in 2005. Since the courses I took were related directly to my area of research, I thought in one year or two, I'll be done with my research! Obviously! That didn't happen.
Every month, I find more and more interesting subject that can be linked to my research. It is like "1000 nights and a night". Computer Engineering is an evolving field, it changes very fast. If you have an idea you want to implement, the next month, this idea will be already taken by somebody else. You have to read a lot to make your "NOVEL" claim and you have to accept the critics. As much as your proposals for Conferences or Journals are rejected as much as you get bitter and better.
Recently, I have been working on Ontology. My area of interest is the aspect of Ontology in Education. How did I get into the Ontology? First, I attended the 2008 Semantic Technology conference [2]. I found it very different than any other Academia Oriented Conference. I felt as if the industry took over the academia and they really want to push the academia into the real world. I was surprised actually! Why, we in the academia arena do not work on the implementation phase? Why do we stuck into the theory and the simulation process and not implement in the real world? Here, I started to change my perspective on how my research should proceed. I don't want a research that will be saved in digital library. I want something that people can use and get benefit from it.
My work at WKU [3] is related to E-learning and Learning Objects (LO). We have been facing the problem of any Educational institution may face, which is organizing the resources. Especially, when these resources are starting to increase exponentially.
At the beginning, my research started with Recommender system and Collaboration Filtering and after the problem of the management of resource, it turned into Information Retrieval and here my research began. To tell you the truth, I have never been so interested in Information Retrieval except, as most of us, in google search engine. But as anyone else with a little bit of curiosity, I start to read about google ranking algorithms, hub and authority concept. unfortunately, google does not publish the whole secret of their engine mechanism. I started to look around for open source search engine that I can use and develop to fit my domain. I found Nutch from Lucene.

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