As you might imagine, slicing the web on loose semantic structures is incredibly complicated, so my class was very impressed that Busytonight has accomplished this goal. Concerning loose semantics - imagine how many ways a date can be represented: just as we might refer to an event with a structured date (3/31/2006, for example), our notions of date representation can be much more loose, yet human-understandable ("next Wednesday", "the 6th of April"). That busytonight seems to be making a reasonable, successful effort at identifying date data and Indexing it is very impressive.

Next, we talked about geolocation. The class agreed that this was a valuable approach, and while BT has not extended beyond the metro area of NYC, many of the classmates came up with user stories where geolocation would be very valuable. Dr. Marchionini pointed out "conference" events - if the BT team were to index conference websites, one could land at the conference location, and easily search and find relevant events to attend with Busytonight.