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Semantic Web Getting Real
Posted by
kdawson
on Sunday February 10, @08:12PM
from the open-it-up-and-give-it-away dept.
from the open-it-up-and-give-it-away dept.
BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."
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Content? (Score:4, Insightful)
Command line vs GUI all over again (Score:4, Interesting)
Semantic webs might be OK for small document sets where you can visualy search tags and click them. Want to look up something about monkeys? Look for the tag that says monkeys (or maybe find primates first, then monkeys) and click it.
But for huge data sets this sucks. After a smallish number of documents & subjects it must be far easier to type monkeys in search box and have Google etc do the search.
This might work for handling some queries, but will suck supremely for complex queries over large data sets (eg. the whole www).
Where's the Money? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where's the Money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is a basic scenario for ten years down the line:
1. You build a profile probably through a combination of allowing your online activities to be profiled, filling out in-depth surve
Yawn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most websites have little to say, and take all day to say it.
Having a detailed graphical analysis of the blather seems unlikely to improve the situation. GI,GO.
It would seem spending just a tad more time writing for HUMANS would be way more productive than writing for machines. Having a thousand computers watching your 100 monkeys seems unlikely to bring enlightenment or useful knowledge out of a pile of garbage and human blathering that passes for information on the web these days.
People used to write web pages.
Now they write software to write web pages.
Its not surprising they now need to write software to understand the web pages.
Whats the point?
Re:Yawn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if we are very forgiving we can get this kind of thing happening with current technology, we just have to supply all the "content" in a form that our primitive algorithms can handle. The Semantic Web is that. Maybe around the 3rd generation of these algorithms we might be ready to do the translation to machine form automatically.. maybe not.. but at least the Semantic Web people are again talking about translation.. was a time when they all said it was a fruitless path and the best way was to just supply applications for creating machine readable content easily.
Re:Yawn... (Score:4, Interesting)
When is the next shuttle launch? [google.com]
This is the first hit, not shuttle launch info. [nasa.gov]
This is the second hit.. [nasa.gov] ah hah! The next launch is on Feb 7.. wait a minute, it's Feb 10! Was it delayed or something? Oh, I see, it says "Launched".. great, when's the next one.. March 11 +.. hmm.. wtf does + mean? Apparently I need to read this [nasa.gov] and hmm.. nothing there about what the + means.. I guess it means it might get delayed, they do that.
See all that reasoning I had to do? See how long that took me? That's what the Semantic Web is for.
Re:Yawn... (Score:4, Insightful)
How does Google's pagerank algorithm?
Re:Yawn... (Score:5, Insightful)
So am I talking about search? Well, yes, but its an algorithm that uses search to answer my questions.. instead of me having to do it.
Think about that soup question.. how would you do it now? I'd go to Google maps.. enter the location of my office, search businesses for restaurants, click on one of the top 5 to see if they have a daily updated menu, note the soup of the day, go back to Google maps, click on the next one, etc, until I had the answer I wanted. That's a pretty simple algorithm.. it's something a machine learning system could come up with.
Re:Yawn... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Let's say you work for a Fortune 500 company and you get over 10,000 emails a day from customers complaining. Do you think it is better to read each one or have a tool that abstracts it to graphically display key concepts that they are complaining about so management can do something about it today?
2. You are a clinical researcher in Cancer and have a terabyte of unstructured patient data. Can you think how text descriptions of pathology reports might be displayed graphically against outcomes to suggest some interesting insights?
There's a lot of useful information that isn't on blogs - although it would be useful for them too. You need to exercise a bit more imagination.
Great, just great ... (Score:5, Funny)
Just what we need. Yet another version of RealPlayer.
pfft... (Score:4, Funny)
Mr. Wenig must not be all that familiar with
In case you have no clue what they're talking abou (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia history, this concept has been around since at least 2001.
hype, waste of time, or big mess (Score:4, Interesting)
On first read, I like what they are trying to do, but I see so many problems with what they are thinking, and I am not a web designer in any sense.
First, I don't have a problem finding things to buy on the internet. The problem is, signal to noise ratio. There are TOO MANY google results for something like 'plasma tv.' No matter what kind of RDF is used, it will be abused by people who want their URL to show up in your search for whatever reason. I think someone touched on this earlier a little in this thread, but it deserves repeating.
Second, can you imagine a scenario where, say, best buy or fry's uses some 'semantic web' application to do real time web searchable updates of their inventory? That's what would have to happen for this to work, and do something that isn't already possible.
Right now, I can search for 'plasma tv' in google or ebay. Then I can call my local retailers to see if they carry that item, and have it in stock. In order for this system to make any kind of tangible change in the example given, retail chains would have to update their inventories online, whenever a purchase is made, or new items delivered to the store.
It's an interesting idea. I wonder if the retailers would go for it? All it means for them is fewer people comming into their stores...sounds like that would hurt sales.
I also hate internet hype. I really fouls things up, more than some want to acknowledge. I try to keep my 64 year old dad educated enough to buy coffee beans on ebay, check email, look at news, etc. Every time he sees 'symantic web' or 'web 2.0' in the media, it just confuses him, and I imagine, people like him who just use the net for basics like online bill pay, ebay, etc. He doesn't need a new buzzword to motivated to shop online or whatever.
he has the motivation already...silly contrived 'new meida' buzzwords just waste time and confuse people
Not the Semantic Web (Score:5, Insightful)
A Little too Cynical (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand being jaded about internet hype and buzzwords but I'm still surprised that after nearly eighty comments there doesn't seem to be anyone who has anything to say other than "vaporware" and "it won't work because of the spammers." Yes, maybe it has been overhyped and yes it is taking a while for the envisioned ideas to come to fruition but that doesn't mean that those ideas aren't worthwhile.
I'll use the following example because I recently had to do this with non semantic tools. Lets say you wanted to see how good or bad a job a transit agency is doing in its city in comparison to other similar cities. A couple of metrics you might use to find similar cities would be population size, population density and land area. Google doesn't do a good job with something like that. You end up needing to search for cities individually and then finding their data points. Or you can find a list of cities ranked by population or population density. If you search on Google for something like that you end up at one of the Wikipedia lists. These lists are helpful but....still lacking. They don't contain all the cities you need or they don't provide a way to look at multiple data sets at the same time. The lists are also compiled by hand and aren't automatically updated when the information on the city page is changed. The data is in wikipedia though. Every city page lists that information in a little box near the start of the article. But how do I take this data that is in Wikipedia from the form that its in into a form that I can use to find what I need to know? Enter the semantic web.
Lets say that wikipedia, or at least the parts dealing with geography, were semantic. Now, there are tens of thousands of pages describing countries, regions, states, counties, parishes, cities, towns and villages. Then those pages are translated into many other languages. Some of the data that these pages contain is of the same type . They all contain the name of the locality, latitude, longitude, size, population size and elevation. For data such as this it would be pretty easy to have a form to enter the data into as opposed using the usual markup and the form could put the data into the proper markup for the page and the proper RDF. Once the data is in proper RDF form it would be easy to automate the process of updating translations of that page with the new data as well as updating any pertinent lists. It would also make it easier for people who want to analyze or use the data because they would be able to access it much more easily.
But nobody really wants machine readable access to this information, you might say, except for the random geek and researcher. I would disagree. Lets say you're using a program like Marble which is similar to Google Earth in some ways but is completely open source. If they wanted to display the population of a city when you hover over it they would currently have to create and maintain their own dataset or they'd have to write a parser to extract it from wikipedia. Neither of those options is particularly easy at the moment but if the information was in semantic form on wikipedia it would be a piece of cake.
The strength of the semantic web isn't, in my opinion, going to be AI like personal agents or anything like that. It'll be things that in many ways are already here. Like Yelp putting geotags on the restaurants they reviews and apps like Google Earth taking that data thats available in machine readable (Semantic!) for to overlay that data on a map so that you can see whats nearby. It'll be applications doing the same with the geotags from flickr. Its really useful mashups like http://www.housingmaps.com/ [housingmaps.com]. Its the transit agency putting realtime bus data up in semantic form so you can see on your iphones google map how far away the bus is. So yeah, maybe the semantic web is overhyped but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of substance there, too.
Cheers,
Greg
Vapourware my arse (Score:4, Insightful)
The company I work for, Garlik [garlik.com] has two products that are run off semantic web technology. DataPatrol [garlik.com] (for pay) and QDOS [qdos.com] (free, in beta).
We use RDF stores instead of databases in some places as they are very good at representing graph structures, which are a real pain to real with in SQL. You often hear the "what can RDF do that SQL can't" type arguments, which are all just nonsense. What can SQL do that a field database, or a bunch of flat files can't? It's all about what you can do easily enough that you will be bothered to do it.
A fully normalised SQL database has many of the attributes of an RDF store, but
a) when was the last time you saw one in production use?
b) how much of a pain was it to write big queries with outer joins?
RDF + SPARQL [w3.org] makes that kind of thing trivial, and has other fringe side benefits (better standardisation, data portability) that you don't get with SQL.
I guess it shouldn't be a surprise to see the comments consisting of the usual round of more-or-less irrelevant jokes and snide commentary - this is Slashdot after all - but I can't help responding.
Re:Semantic Spam (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Semantic Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
It just doesn't seem like the best idea in the world to me.
Re:Semantic Spam (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Semantic Spam (Score:5, Informative)
I think you are missing the point of Semantic Web: you can refer or link to an object, not just document.
The company declares its URI. Now, If you are writing an article about this company, you can uniquely identify it and every web crawler knows *exactly* what company are you talking about. If the URI for the company is a hyperlink to its web site, then it can't be abused: the company itself declares what it is. The unique URI will in fact be a link to some file with information about company (maybe an RDF file -- doesn't really matter for the concept)
The system can (and will be abused) in the same way as an old web: irrelevant links, words, concepts -- nothing new for the crawler and can be defeated with existing techniques.
Again, Semantic Web = Links between concepts, not just documents, so please do not bury the good idea under the pile of misunderstanding.
Re:Symantec Web? AHHHHHHH!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Semantic web getting real [player]
and immediately thought "it was bad enough when the original web got it"
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The links in that article are neat. I am looking forward
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And the only reason we moved from Web 1.0 to web 2.0, and the only reason we need to move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 is...
We are still stuck on Search 1.0
Well, ok, to be fair to Google -- Search 1.5
Sorry, but we won't see much