[iks-community] Introduction: Peter Mika, Yahoo

[Peter Mika]

Hi All,

My name is Peter Mika, and I work as a researcher and data architect at 
Yahoo!, based in Barcelona, Spain. Our research lab is part of Yahoo! 
Research [1] and  has been established in 2006. We are covering a wide 
range of topics, including multimedia, distributed systems, data mining 
(in particular, web mining), and NLP.

As a researcher, my personal interests revolve around semantic 
technologies and the Semantic Web, and the application of the 
technologies to web search, from query interpretation, through ranking 
to result presentation. We are doing quite a few things in this area, 
one particular initiative I wanted to mention is that we have recently 
started organizing a semantic search evaluation campaign. If anyone is 
interested I would be happy to discuss that as well.

On the product side, I'm working as a data architect on KR questions 
related to how we consume and use metadata inside Yahoo. As an example, 
many of you might have heard of SearchMonkey, which allows site owners 
and developers to create applications that change the way search results 
are presented, by using metadata associated with those pages [2]. I'm 
also doing a part of the evangelism, talking to our communities of 
developers and publishers, which gives me a fair bit of understanding of 
how people relate to semantic technologies 'in the wild'.

Best,
Peter

[1] http://research.yahoo.com
[2] http://developer.search.yahoo.com/start