Improving Machine Learning Tasks By Integrating Private Datasets

Frederick Giasson

In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of two big families of datasets: the public and the private ones. Invaluable public datasets like Wikipedia, Wikidata, Open Corporates and others have been created and leveraged by organizations world-wide. However, as great as they are, most organization still rely on private datasets of their own curated data.

In this article, I want to demonstrate how high-value private datasets may be integrated into the Cognonto’s KBpedia knowledge base to produce a significant impact on the quality of the results of some machine learning tasks. To demonstrate this impact, I have created a demo that is supported by a “gold standard” of 511 web pages taken at random, to which we have tagged the organization that published the web page. This demo is related to the publisher analysis portion of the Cognonto demo. We will use this gold standard to calculate the performance metrics of the publisher analyzer but more precisely, we will analyze the performance of the analyzer depending on the datasets it has access to perform its predictions.

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Web Page Analysis With Cognonto

Frederick Giasson

Extract Structured Content, Tag Concepts & Entities

 

Cognonto is brand new. At its core, it uses a structure of nearly 40 000 concepts. It has about 138,000 links to external classes and concepts that defines huge public datasets such as Wikipedia, DBpedia and USPTO. Cognonto is not a children’s toy. It is huge and complex… but it is very usable. Before digging into the structure itself, before starting to write about all the use cases that Cognonto can support, I will first cover all of the tools that currently exist to help you understand Cognonto and its conceptual structure and linkages (called KBpedia).

The embodiment of Cognonto that people can see are the tools we created and that we made available on the cognonto.com web site. Their goal is to show the structure at work, what ties where, how the conceptual structure and its links to external schemas and datasets help discover new facts, how it can drive other services, etc.

This initial blog post will discuss the demo section of the web site. What we call the Cognonto demo is a web page crawler that analyzes web pages to tag concepts, to tag named entities, to extract structured data, to detect language, to identity topics, and so forth. The demo uses the KBpedia structure and its linkages to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Freebase and USPTO to tag content that appears in the analyzed web pages. But there is one thing to keep in mind: the purpose of Cognonto is to link public or private datasets to the structure to expand its knowledge and make these tools (like the demo) even more powerful. This means that a private organization could use Cognonto, add their own datasets and link their own schemas, to improve their own version of Cognonto or to tailor it for their own purpose.

Let’s see what the demo looks like, what is the information it extracts and analyzes from any web page, and how it ties into the KBpedia structure.

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Cognonto

Frederick Giasson
I am proud to announce the start of a new venture called Cognonto. I am particularly proud of it because even if it is just starting, it is in fact more than eight years old. It is the embodiment of eight years of research, of experimentation, of a big deal of frustration and of great joy with my long-time partner Mike. cognonto_logo-square

Eight years ago, we set a 5-to-10-year vision for our work as partners. We defined an initial series of technological goals for which we outlined a series of yearly milestones. The goals were related to help solving decades old problems with data integration and interoperability using a completely new research field (at the time): the Semantic Web.

And there we are eight years later, after working for an endless number of hours to create all kinds of different projects and services to pay for the research and the pieces of technologies we develop for these purposes. Cognonto is the embodiment of that effort, but it also created a series of other purposeful projects such as the creation of Stuctured Dynamics, UMBEL, the Open Semantic Framework and a series of other open source collaterals.

We spent eight years to create, sanitize, to make coherent and consistent, to generate and regenerate a conceptual structure of now 38,930 reference concepts with 138,868 mapping links to 27 external schemas, vocabularies and datasets. This led to the creation of KBpedia, which is the knowledge graph that drives Cognonto. The full statistics are available here.

I can’t thank Mike enough for this long and wonderful journey that led to the creation of Cognonto. I sent him an endless number of concepts lists that he diligently screened, assessed and mapped. We spent hundred of hours to discuss the knots and bolts of the structure, to argue about its core concepts and how it should be defined and used. It was not without pain, but I believe that the result is truly astonishing.

I won’t copy/paste the Cognonto press release here, a link will suffice. I it is just not possible for me to write a better introduction than the two pagers that Mike wrote for the press release. I would also suggest that you read his Cognonto introduction blog post: Cognonto is on the Hunt for Big AI Game.

In the coming weeks, I will write a lot about Cognonto, what it is, how it can be used, what are its use cases, how the information that is presented in the demo and the knowledge graph sections should be interpreted and what these pages tell you.

Big Structures: Where the Semantic Web Meets Artificial Intelligence

Frederick Giasson

Mike Bergman just published the second part1 of his series of blog posts that summarize the evolution of the Semantic Web in the last decade, and how our experience of the last 7 years of research in that field has led to these observations.

The second part of that series is: Big Structure: At The Nexus of Knowledge Bases, the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence.

He continues to outline some issues with the Semantic Web, but more importantly how it fits in a much broader ecosystem, namely KBAI (Knowledge Based AI). He explains the difference between data integration and data interoperability and how these problems could benefit leveraging a sub-set of the Artificial Intelligence domain related to data interoperability:


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These two blog posts set the foundation and the direction where Structured Dynamics is heading in the coming years and where we will focus our research projects and how we will help our clients with their data integration and interoperability issues.

We welcome hearing from you!