Wikia, Inc. the provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, announced that Intellisophic, Inc., the publisher of subject-specific taxonomy, thesaurus and vocabulary products for the search, categorization and text-mining industry, has agreed to make its high-performance categorization software available via open source in conjunction with the Search Wikia project. Categorization is the process of organizing information based on a common set of characteristics or concepts, which in terms of Internet searching helps to increase accuracy.

    By understanding the vocabularies, terminology and relationships of concepts in different categories of content such as finance, gaming, or news, the quality of search results for the related keywords can be significantly increased.

    This announcement comes on the heels of Wikia’s recent announcement that it had acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. In an effort to better Internet search for everyone, Intellisophic has agreed to open source its engine and make it available for any search application built using Wikia’s search tools. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal.

     “The Web is an amazing collection of human knowledge, unfortunately it is unorganized, and that can lead to frustration for businesses, researchers, students, etc.,” said Michael Hoey, chief executive officer, Intellisophic. “We believe everyone will benefit from the availability of more robust tools and share Wikia’s vision that search, and the entire web experience, can be improved through collaboration.”

     “The Intellisophic text categorization technology is a very important addition to the open source search community,” said Jeremie Miller, a lead developer in the Search Wikia effort. “I’m really excited to see the outpouring of support from organizations and individuals everywhere who want to help in dramatically moving the search industry forward through transparency and collaboration. Having advanced data mining technologies available openly for advancing search, combined with Grub and other contributions in the coming months, we are looking to revolutionize the space from the ground up for the first time since Google launched ten years ago.”

    Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.