Present Significance
The present significance of IE pertains to the growing amount of information available in unstructured form. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, refers to the existing Internet as the web of documents and advocates that more of the content be made available as a web of data. Until this transpires, the web largely consists of unstructured documents lacking semantic metadata. Knowledge contained within these documents can be made more accessible for machine processing by means of transformation into relational form, or by marking-up with XML tags. An intelligent agent monitoring a news data feed requires IE to transform unstructured data into something that can be reasoned with. A typical application of IE is to scan a set of documents written in a natural language and populate a database with the information extracted.
Read more about this topic: Information Extraction
Famous quotes containing the words present and/or significance:
“Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)