Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web 250
An anonymous reader writes "As we all know, Tim Berners-Lee is the hero of the Web's creation story--he conjured up this system and chose not to capitalize on it commercially. It turns out that Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July) had a much grander plan in mind all along--a little something he calls the Semantic Web that would enable computers to extract meaning from far-flung information as easily as today's Internet links individual documents. In an interview with Technology Review, the Web-maestro explains his vision of 'a single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone.'"
What is the semantic web? (Score:5, Informative)
"Where's some semantic web software?" (Score:5, Informative)
Eclipse plugins [semwebcentral.org], visualization tools... there's some good stuff there.
Opposing view (Score:5, Informative)
Semantic Web (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The rest of us call this... (Score:3, Informative)
Google identifies relationships between data using only on the links between pages containing the data.
The Semantic web represents relationships between data based on metadata [w3.org] (i.e. data about data). This is a far more powerful way to describe the meaning of data.
works for me.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean its the best way to accomplish what you are trying to do.
The next "web"? (Score:3, Informative)
...from the minds of Alan Kay, David Smith, David Reed, and others...
Google can leverage its search (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Second System Effect (Score:1, Informative)
He got lucky once, because he put together some tools that were simple and straightforward enough for people to pick it up quickly, thereby avoiding the fate of the dozens of other hypertext systems going back to the late 1980's.
Now, like all second systems, he wants to "do it right", over-engineering away all of the things that made the first one take off
No, you are correct. Tim is a physicist who has no background in CS and it shows. The entire AI community thinks the Semantic Web is a joke which is why nobody with any real credibility in the field is studying it. Other semantic approaches are being researched, but they aren't anything like the Semantic Web because you can't trust/expect content authors to tag their pages correctly. Also, there is no one single correct ontology, what is needed is a generic framework for reasoning about and merging information from different ontologies/viewpoints.
Actually, Google is a search engine (Score:5, Informative)
The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.
Google searches undifferentiated text. In contrast, the semantic web is all about differentiating text by adding meta tags.
For example, the word "Hilton" on a web page is ambiguous. It could be a hotel, or a celebrity. Which is it? With the semantic web we'd know:
Of course, this is a fairly trivial example. A more meaningful example:
Re:The rest of us call this... (Score:3, Informative)
The Semantic Web just provides a method for expressing metadata. Maintaining the integrity of those expressions involves a different set of problems. Some of the solutions include trust metrics [moloko.itc.it] like Slashdot's own distributed moderation [umich.edu] (PDF) or Advogato [advogato.org].
Re:What Does 42 Mean for Privacy? (Score:2, Informative)
There are several solutions to the problems you describe. I'll address the few I'm most comfortable with responding to - not because the others are unsovable, simply because I don't want to provide inadequate information.
All information on the web should be taken with, as they say, a grain of salt. Depending on what you are looking at, it has more or less value. For example, something on Wikipedia can probably be assumed to be relatively accurate, whereas something on Joe Schmo's website on Geocities will probably be considered to be less accurate in general. The semantic web allows for you to see who is saying something in a number of ways, and to verify this information:
Each of these methods of determining where information is coming from has its own special place in assigning credence to the document in question. Thus, if a document signed by crschmidt@crschmidt.net says that the person "CHristopher Schmidt" owns the email address crschmidt@crschmidt.net - it's probably safe to trust that person.
Once the data is available on the web, it is easy to find other data: one of the basic terms is "seeAlso" - a way for providing other URLs to look for data at. Once the web starts, it is easy to link it, and to do so is to increase the data .You don't need something smart or intelligent - simply wander around, collect all the rdfs:seeAlso links, and download those - and continue from there. This process, known as "scuttering", is an easy way to start creating a relatively large data store.
Using descriptions of when information is updated allows tools to understand when they should check back for more information. Similar to the way RSS feeds (which are a part of the Semantic Web) can inform tools that they will be updated in 2, 4, 6, 24 hours, general RDF documents can do the same thing - saying 'check me again in a week" or more.
There are currently tools for working with the semantic web in a small scale. Although this is nothing like the big dream - having almost everything described, so that computers can really understand the world around them - these tools do have their usefulness. I can now ask "What is the name of the person whose aim name is cr5chmidt", and be told the answer. Although it's not perfect - very little about the semantic web is perfect yet - it doesn't need to be. For more information, see my post on the bot I created to spider semweb data in my blog [livejournal.com].
As you said, it won't be easy. However, it is possible, and it seems to me more and more likely each day that working on these tools and increasing the amount of semantic data in every little way can help.