UMBC ebiquity
Project Idea
trendTracker
December 1, 2003 - December 1, 2004
One way to identify and monitor new ideas and concepts in society is by the changing frequencies of words and phrases used to describe them. This applies pretty broadly, whether we are talking about a new concept (cloning), a technology (Java) or a fad (Britany Spears). This project involves writting a simple web service that use's Google's usenet archives to perform search on the frequency of a given word or phrase. For example, you could find out when people began talking about the "semantic web" and how the idea's popularity has risen or fallen over the last five years. I think a few weeks of hacking in Perl or Java and HTML could produce a cool web site that would win it's authors their 15 minutes of fame.
If you are interested in exploring or working on this idea, contact Tim Finin