Supporting Data Analytics Applications Which Utilize Cognitive Services

Abstract

A wide variety of services are available over the Web which can dramatically improve the functionality of applications. These services include information retrieval (including data lookups from a variety of sources and Web searches), natural language understanding, visual recognition, and data storage. A key problem is how to provide support for applications which use these services. This paper presents a rich software development kit (SDK) which accesses these services and provides a variety of features applications need to use these services, optimize performance, and compare them. A key aspect of our SDK is its support for natural language understanding services. We also present a personalized knowledge base built on top of our rich SDK that uses publically available data sources as well as private information. The knowledge base supports data analysis and reasoning over data.