- provide us with valuable requirements to guide our research on diversity-enabled retrieval and interpretation of information

- enable us to thoroughly test, integrate and evaluate all technologies and algorithms designed and developed in other WPs

- enable and support research for the research community for testing new approaches, by providing an infrastructure as well as an extendible set of algorithms and test collections, thus fostering research collaboration also beyond the consortium.

1.    Indexing: a novel indexing framework which will model the three dimensions of our opinion/fact database: the first dimension, content, will be modelled using state-of-the-art information retrieval methods capable of indexing the lexical content of events. Note that by lexical content we do not mean just terms: we will index also entire events, defined as semantic frames, i.e., who did what to whom, when and where. Second, we will index events along the temporal dimension: for each event we will store the duration when the event was observed or reported. Lastly, we will attribute a confidence value for each opinion or fact stored, depending on occurrence, source, and link structure, among others.
 

2.    Search: efficient search and ranking mechanisms which can exploit this multi-dimensional opinion/fact space. Queries will combine content and temporal constraints, as for example in the query “gas prices AFTER 2100”. The results will be ranked, not only based on the degree to which they satisfy the query constraints but also based on the confidence attached to the corresponding opinion or fact.