Paul Allen s Evri whips up a semantic widget

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Evri, a Seattle-based semantic-Web project backed by Paul Allen s Vulcan Capital, has thrown open the doors on its beta site and on Evri s Garden, a sandbox for researchers and interested bystanders.

Formerly known as Hypertext Solutions, Evri s first widget offering in the Garden is a pop-up that examines the words it finds significant generally nouns on a page and returns various related articles, images, and video, and if sufficient connections are available a circle-and spoke chart, showing terms with which a given word has a close connection. An automatically generated chart might link, for example, Barack Obama with Joe Biden, or Beverly Hills with Ed McMahon, or Mariners with failure. I may have made that last one up. You can check for yourself on Evri s site or download the widget for your own uses.

Like Google News, the search process is entirely algorithm-driven, drawing its links from a variety of highly regarded information services, very nearly in real time. By parsing the semantics of the information it finds, Evri aims to provide better context than a search engine might -- guiding you to, for instance, articles on Madonna the singer rather than Madonna the religious figure. One of those Madonnas is, by the way, Evri-linked directly to Bill Clinton. Guess.

An early version of the search widget originally saw daylight at last May s All Things D conference. During his demonstration there, CEO Neil Roseman, formerly VP of technology at Amazon, described the widget s MO as search less, understand more.

I question whether Evri entirely understands my most profound search needs; a check for the television show Pushing Daisies passed back on-point images, news, connections and a Wikipedia-based show synopsis, but the duplicate photos of the show-inspired crochet afghan may have been a bit random. Still, it works, and could add a little semantic sparkle to many a dull Web page.
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