Because of this blog, I thought for quite a long time that a mailing list for Watson wasn't useful. But, I have been told that some people sometimes prefer to receive the information, rather than having to (ask their aggregator to) look for it. In addition, a mailing list where people can discuss issues and ideas with eachother seems preferable to the (quite unidirectional) interaction bounded by the comment mechanism of the blog (that is anyway not generating too much trafic...).

So, without going further in details, this is to announce the brand new Watson mailing list: kmi-watson-list@open.ac.uk.

The goal of this list is to host annoucements concerning Watson (new features, new tools, etc.), and discussions between developers and users of Watson, or in other terms, almost anything that concerns Watson. In that sense, the content of the mailing will overlap with the one of the blog, at least for some time.

To subscribe, you can either leave a comment on this blog entry, or send me an e-mail. If you don't know my e-mail address, you can use the following form on the KMi Website.

So, I look forward to seeing you on the list :-)

Laurian just made me discover bookmarklets (yeah I know, that's quite late to find out about this kind of things). For those ignorant people like me who don't know what bookmarklets are, wikipedia provides clear explanations and examples:

"A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program stored as a URL within a bookmark..."
Because I quite like this kind of technological gadgets, I gave it a try on Watson. I wrote (well in fact I mostly copied and adapted) a small bookmarklet that query Watson with the words selected in the current webpage.

Let's try it. First you put the following link in your bookmarks:

Watson keyword search.
This link actually contains a small Javascript that get the selection in the current Web page, and send the browser to Watson with the words of the selection as parameters. Now, imagine, you are reading this page about how to build a wind turbine (who said the example has to be realistic) and it suddenly hit you that you would like to know about ontologies concerning renewable energies (yeah who?). You select the words "renewable energy" in the page, click on your Watson keyword search bookmark, and hop, magically, your browser displays the list of ontologies and entities describing concepts like renewable resource, papers about renewable energies or research groups on the topic. Isn't that fun? (BTW, as readers using Safari, Internet Explorer or other exotic browsers may already have discovered, this doesn't work in every browser... try firefox).

Now I wonder if there could be a really useful application of bookmarklet with Watson...

Yet another feature that was waiting to be implemented for a long time and that is now available: you can now modify the options of the keyword search feature of the Watson Web interface.

There are two ways to change the options: resticting the search to certain entities, or to certain scopes.

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