
Going from a 'Web of links' to a 'Web of meaning' 142
neutron_p writes "Computer scientists from Lehigh University are building the Semantic Web, which will handle more data, resolve contradictions and draw inferences from users' queries. The new improved Web will also combine pieces of information from multiple sites in order to find answers to questions."
When (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:When (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: When (Score:2, Funny)
Unless (Score:4, Interesting)
And even for humans, the "meaning" of a certain thing can be different thing to different people !
Although I applaud the job they are doing for Semantic Web, I wonder how they can inject "meaning" into the whole thing.
My biggest fear is the 1984-like "my meaning is THE meaning and you canna have any other meaning" thing.
Meaning = ability to Intelligently Handle (Score:5, Informative)
Normal web pages have meaning for browsers, it's just that that meaning is limited to "how to draw words for the user."
What we're doing, is making it so that your computer can make special use of messages on the web, to do smarter things.
It would be scary if the Semantic Web [w3.org] were about "my meaning is THE meaning." But it is explicitely not like that. In fact, one of the main things about it is that anyone can make up their own languages, their own way of modelling the world.
There are tools [w3.org] that make it so you can say, "My word X is sort of like their word Y," but it's acknowledged that such translations will be imperfect. Likely, fuzzy logic, and systems that are able to ask for clarification (and remember responses), will be used to mediate that sort of things.
You may also be interested in my favorite page on AI by Open Mind. [kurzweilai.net] The Semantic Web isn't explicitely about AI, but it opens the door for a lot of AI work.
ofcourse... (Score:1)
Re:When (Score:2)
>metadata-friendly protocols and file formats?
When IPv6 is fully deployed, and the US got a black female president that
just invented cold fusion.
Re:When (Score:1)
When google-spammers stop putting 8 million irrelevant words in their
<meta name="" content="">
tags?
Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
Re:Ummm (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the reasons the internet has become so popular is because everyone can have their say. Unfortunately, this has the side effect that there is a lot of incorrect and misleading information out there. Everything is also self-reinforcing, because one person often copies their "facts" from another website without first checking the veracity. Even major news outlets and scientific publications have been caught out by this in the past.
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
There is another way in which it's self-reinforcing. People look for sites and pages and people that reflect their own opinions.
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ummm (Score:3, Insightful)
That won't work for stuff that's politically sensitive, since people will mod sites down just because they dislike what the site says, even if it is accurate. It also gets really complicated with sites that are accurate on one subject but don't know jack about another.
Computers will have "beliefs" reflecting their owner's own.
In that case, what's the point? If your computer onl
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
I am interested in where you have found a source of information that does not match this description.
I was not aware extra-terrestrials were running libraries I could get at. Certainly no known human data source has ever risen to this standard.
(Criticizing
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
One of the biggest stumbling blocks of the semantic web (semantic anything, in fact) is Trust: how do you know the other guy is telling the truth? Human beings are very good at evaluating trustworthiness from a website, but when we switch to a web made for understanding by machines, we lose that ability. We need some kind of trust infrastructure wich assigns credibility to sources and so on...
Another stumbling block is common ontologies, i.e. how do we know we are talking about the same thing, th
If for no other reason than IP law (Score:3, Interesting)
How does it combine information from different sources in a way that keeps the user knowledge
Re:If for no other reason than IP law (Score:1)
Like when I type "Unicycle Jousting" (Score:3, Insightful)
A semantic web is only as useful as the metadata, and people go to great lengths to mislead and disguise.
Re:Like when I type "Unicycle Jousting" (Score:2)
In fact, it seems like the trust problem isn't that different at all, perhaps the only real difference is that with the WWW, you get to look at every page yourself and make the judgment call, "does this look like a scammer, are there lots of blink tag
Dependency: web of trust (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we could run into the same problem with the Semantic Web, as it too allows web developers to attach arbitrary metadata to their pages. The only way to prevent unscrupulous web developers from embedding inaccurate RDF in their pages in hopes of attracting more hits is by establishing a web-of-trust framework.
Google implements a very crude version of web-of-trust that assumes "incoming hyperlinks==trust". I think that in order for the Semantic Web to be
Something similar. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Something similar. (Score:1, Informative)
Why is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is this news? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is this news? (Score:1)
Ditto the University of Southampton [soton.ac.uk]. I've been working on a SW-related project, AKT [aktors.org], for the last four years; as part of this work, I was a member of the W3C working group (along with Jeff Heflin) that wrote the OWL Web Ontology Language.
Other places to look at are Jim Hendler's MIND group [umd.edu] in Maryland, which has been doing some sterling work over the last few years (as an aside, Jeff used to be Jim's PhD student).
Resolve Contradictions? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Easy! (Score:2)
Yeah, this is really easy. Just look next to the title and see what score the moderators have assigned and you get a sense of whether there be contradictions! Generally if the score is lower than 1, there could be contradictions so:
Yeah it's really difficult.
Re:It's Easy! (Score:1)
>:P
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the ontology of the semantic web comes in 3 flavors, OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The first two are limited enough that they are decidable (I'm not su
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:1)
You misunderstand what it does. (Score:1)
BETTER FORMATTED THAN PARENT (Score:2, Insightful)
The World Wide Web cannot "at its core handle inconsistent information" yet it seems to lurch along okay.
The Semantic Web is not some attempt at global knowledge, perfect knowledge, perfect reasoning, or anything of the sort, regardless of what many posters, including yourself, seem to have construed it as.
It is intended to be an analogue of the World Wide Web, which is primarily consumed by humans, that is instead primarily consumed by computers.
Can it know everything? Of cours
Re:BETTER FORMATTED THAN PARENT (Score:2)
About the web, it's perfectly capable of handling inconsistent information, as all the information it
Re:BETTER FORMATTED THAN PARENT (Score:1)
Most of the practical ontology research focuses on internal ontologies in data stores, so that an RDF store can return "more" information than was put in. Only inform
Re: (Score:1)
But okay. I don't think we're in disagreement here: I totally agree with you that the "low level tools" are the ones that are of interest here, I'm just sceptical about the scalability of the grand objective: crisp infe
Re: (Score:1)
I agree with you completely on this point. The most important advances that have been made in the knowledge engineering community over the last decade have been those that have tried to fuse non-symbolic and machine learning techniques with the good old-fashioned AI of expert systems.
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:1)
The knowledge engineering community has moved on since the expert systems of the 1980s, and techniques for handling uncertainty and inconsistency are now commonplace. The SW draws heavily on this experience.
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:2, Insightful)
alright, having read the friggin' article, all i have to say is that they have their work cut out for them.
the problem with searching currently is that only librarians, who've had at least a year or two of graduate studies really know the ontology that libraries use. Common users bring their own concepts and ontologies to bear when they're searching for information. But if you move away from the monolithic single ontologies that libraries use, you have the problem that you have to be open to the fact tha
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:1)
"the ironic thought that pops to mind is that if you've got a set of universal descriptors, then don't you already have an ontology? And if you don't have a set of universal descriptors, how would you ever create a coherent ontology?"
There's nothing particularly ironic about it. The question you're asking exposes a fairly common misunderstanding of what the Semantic Web's all about. Several years ago, I attended the talk by Tim Berners Lee in which he announced the principles of the Semantic Web. As I rec
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:1)
Re:Resolve Contradictions? (Score:1)
The Semantic Web as envisaged by the W3C is based on the RDF and OWL languages; the latter has a Description Logic as its underlying formalism, which is a subset of first order predicate logic with computationally attractive properties that lead to tractable decision procedures for satisfiability.
Distribution is a separate issue. While assembling the parts of a distributed ontology may be expensive, it doesn't affect the algorithmic complexity of determining whether a set of axioms contain a contradiction.
Snake oil... (Score:3, Insightful)
with their favourite mode of publication being the press release.
Spot on (Score:1)
and draw inferences.. (Score:5, Funny)
..from user's queries.
Clippy..? Is that you?
Re:and draw inferences.. (Score:2)
"it looks like you are searching for pr0n. would you like me to lock the door and dim the lights via X10? how about some romantic music? maybe add to your search results a froogle side-bar with the best astro-glide prices on the net?"
It's the authoring tools, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The same can be said about any semantic web technology - whether it's FOAF [foaf-project.org] (an RDF vocab for describing people and their interests) or a vocabulary for reviews [ideagraph.net]. As soon as major authoring tools (i.e. both web editors and content management systems) start integrating these technologies, people will use them if they are useful. Do not expect web designers or bloggers to have a clue about all the great things that the semantic web can do - give them one useful thing which they understand, package it in a pretty UI, and they will start using it.
Re:It's the authoring tools, stupid (Score:2)
The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2)
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:1)
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2)
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2)
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2)
I agree completely - most of the beginner HTML books I've read seemed bent on teaching that content and layout go together, exactly the opposite of what the W3 advocates. Luckily there are a few beginner books [peachpit.com] that teach HTML and CSS side-by-side, but, as an instructor, I'd like to see this approach adopted by all instead of a few.
The Semantic Web sounds great, but I really don't trust people creating websites to include pertinent and accurate metadata about their site. If someone creates a site and simpl
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:1)
"The Semantic Web sounds great, but I really don't trust people creating websites to include pertinent and accurate metadata about their site."
You're quite right to suspect that the Semantic Web won't start in the blogs of the world. It doesn't scratch any particular itch for individual web authors.
But consider its value for a business that works with dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of large clients, all of whom submit their data in more or less arbitrary formats. There is huge value for them in stan
Re:The semantic Web and valid HTML (Score:2)
However, HTML is not so relevant in the Semantic Web. There are many reasons for this, but I guess one is that it is expected to never get beyond tagsoup... Well, I dunno...
It is RDF [w3.org] that is at the core of the Semantic Web. Funny, I have been interested in RDF for six years, still I have
Being built by Lehigh university eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Whichever lehigh uni professor submitted this is stooping pretty low trying to raise publicity (and hence finance) I would think!
Re:Being built by Lehigh university eh? (Score:2)
I took some classes from Professor Heflin; he's a very bright guy. As for the semantic web, I don't think it will catch on. When you write your web pages you have to follow a strict schema and add all this metadata to each page for it be 'correct'. Most users could give two shits about this metadata and you'll still have chaos in the web.
it's the Gibson! (Score:3, Funny)
Am I the only one who recognized the main graphic for the story as a lifted screencap from the movie Hackers? That movie's SOLE redeeming quality was Angelina Jolie...
Well, ok, that and the laugh factor. Not quite as much fun as MST3K'ing The Mummy with about a half dozen friends though.
too little RDF (Score:2)
I even cheated and specified the 'seed' starting web sites as sites that I knew to use RDF.
Re:too little RDF (Score:3, Informative)
If you search for *.rdf maybe you won't find as much... a lot of it is *.rss, *.xml and other things.
Also, google doesn't index them.
A lot of work to be done (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A lot of work to be done (Score:1)
One of the advantages of the Ontology as a model is that we can avoid needing a 'global' one, instead we can compose ontologies and translate between them to create the semantic viewpoint.
The amount of time we will have to invest in adding metadata to the data will dramatically increase over time
There are additional issues, such as 'faithless' annotation (liars and miscreants) as well as genuine errors (human or other). Tag
Multiple level of links (Score:1)
On the same page, a level of links should be increasable/decreasable. The default one would be the one we see currently on all the web sites.
When going to the next level, the page would not reload at all but the browser would just show the links at different places on the page. These links would have been setted by the webmaster on ideas that require linking a sentence or a part of it, not jus
in other words... (Score:1, Interesting)
It will essentially be a librarian?
The problem with this is that users first need to know what the heck they're actually looking for. You can draw as many inferences as you like, but so long as people search for "art" when they're interested in "tattoos" you aren't going to get much that's relevant. An
Welcome to 2001 (Score:2, Insightful)
W3C semantic web activity from 2001 [w3.org].
Heflin's Thesis [lehigh.edu] from 2001.
I'm rather skeptical of the whole thing, it seems to me to be like "Wouldn't it be nice if people documented their web page content better? Then we could do all these neat things." The second statement is right, but I fear the first statment is intractable.
I have my doubts... (Score:5, Insightful)
I also feel that talking about automatically organizing the world's knowledge in a semantic web is just more of the same hot air that we've been hearing from AI departments for the last few decades. You can't automatically allocate meaning to something unless you have the capability for "common sense" reasoning, and the world knowledge at your fingertips to be able to interpret the data intelligently, like a human would. And even then, different humans would interpret it differently... so there are multiple meanings, and anyway, how to allocate "meaning" to something abstract such as a poem or piece of art?
And if we require real people to add metadata to everything... well, it just ain't going to happen, in my humble opinion. Adding meta data is a pain in the ass, since you have to define the categories of object, agree on meanings for all the different taxonomies that will have to be used to describe the world... then there's the potential for abuse, as spammers will inevitably seed their documents with inappropriate metadata. So, the "honest" people can't be bothered, and the dishonest people will wreck anything that does get built. So, it ain't gonna happen.
The beauty of google (not that I love google, but they did hit a nail on the head) is that it requires no effort or "machine intelligence", beyond a very simple algorithm that depends not on AI but rather real, tangible relationships between words and documents (proximity and links). This is something that computers can be really good at.
Just my opinion... obviously there will be others out there who will vehemently disagree, and that's fine! Go ahead and try, you'll learn a lot in the process and you will probably come out with some tangential technology that you never thought of initially but is useful nonetheless.
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the curse of AI right there. Because you happen to know the algorithm underneat Google, you don't think of it as "intelligent". But to the average Joe it can c
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:2)
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:2)
As computers solve more and more difficult problems (beating humans at chess, learning to filter spam, semi-autonomously exploring space...) we become blase with our achievements and our ambitions raise. But let's not forget that when those problems were defined, we said that if a computer
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:2)
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:2)
the computer had made associations like "father" and "president" [...] So, I do not doubt computers will begin to understand meaning
A few questions about this inference: How is what the computer did anything more than a simple correlation? Could the computer tell you what the scope and limits of the association are (i.e., in what ways a president is like and unlike a father)? Could it parse/create a sentence in which it had to determine whether to use either of these words in a metap
Re:I have my doubts... (Score:2)
My hypothesis there is that time for data/information/knowledge to settle into kind of a state of integration with retrieval/inference engines/mechanisms is a crucial factor mostly not taken enough care of (IMHO). Support is given by the fact that the socialization period of humans is so much longer than for all the re of mammals.
I also feel that talking about automatically organizing the world's knowledge i
Lojban? (Score:1)
obscured by the cloud (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning??? (Score:2)
Crispin
I can't wait! (Score:2)
The meaning of is V1.agra and C011.3G3 GIRLZ!
Work Load (Score:1)
Representation of meaning is not the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Another way of putting it is, any program capable of extracting the same meaning from XML that humans can, should be able to understand English without much trouble. It's the whole Intelligence-complete" thing. Like NP-complete, there seem to be a class of problems which can only be solved by real intelligence, and they're all pretty much equivalent in that with real intelligence, you can solve them all.
Re:Representation of meaning is not the problem (Score:1)
English is very poor, it's somewhat possible to get effective searching from something like google from the structure of the document and its content, but a better annotation will permit more accurate and more complete retrieval, as well as retrieval based on non-obvious features.
Re:Representation of meaning is not the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Lets take a look at English, shall we?
"Milk costs five dollars."
"Milk always costs five dollars."
"Milk's price is five dollars."
"Isn't it cool that milk costs that low, low price of five dollars?"
"I am so gosh-darn happy that I can obtain the glorious bounty of milk for a mere five (count 'em, one-two-three-four-five) bills featuring our esteemed former president, George Washington."
Now, lets take a look at some possible semantic web statements.
Milk hasPrice $5
anonymousItem has
New Language (Score:1)
Another Clippy (Score:2, Funny)
''Here are the results to the question you should have asked.''
Maybe next they'll have the Semantic Web manage the way electronic voting is counted. Semantic Clippy will count your 'intent' instead of your actual vote.
Hmmm ... (Score:2)
That should yield some interesting answers.
"42. The Answer that you are looking for is 42."
"You searched for "space ship one", but what you really want to search for is "natalie portman hot grits"."
Isn't the whole point of the Internet a database of information which we can access using tools - not to create a "web of knowledge"?
why this will fail (Score:3, Informative)
Google works because it is largely a statistical tool that uses some meta-information.
While I could see frameworks being used for very specific purposes, like searching a homogeneous (e.g., slashdot, pubmed, nytimes) web-site where all content is controlled. But extending these ideas to a heterogenous web that would no doubt take advantages of such a volunteer system is ludicrous.
I also take issue with the top-down mind-state that they will be able to predict what is useful to the user. This is why statistical importance and quantity is the only realistic method for such a massive undertaking (which google is still actively researching).
I think that the only useful research to come out of such an endeavor would be to have news-sites, as mentioned above, implement and be scanned using an ontological browser. Of course, I am not sure how this would be different than Lexus-Nexus (sp?).
Guess he forgot (Score:1)
Apple OSX afficionados.
Didn't we see this in Quicksilver (Score:2)
The whole reason the web is popular is because it's trivially simple to create content for it. Maybe the web would be more useful if it was like a giant encyclopedia but it's just an exercise in futility unless everyone gets on board.
Re:Didn't we see this in Quicksilver (Score:2)
Too much work at a badly defined task (Score:2)
Here's an analogy that doesn't prove anything but reframes the problem. As far as I understand it, the Pentagon cannot be audited, because
Heflin is wrong. (Score:2)
Yes it has.
See Relation Arithmetic Revived [boundaryinstitute.org]and Structure Theory [boundaryinstitute.org]. These two papers were written as a result of Hewlett-Packard's E-Speak project's support of a continuation of work begun at Paul Allen's thinktank, Interval Research. These then led to an understanding of the importance of identity theory in performing logic with what we
Far, if not impossible. (Score:1)
It's analogous to C and Smalltalk. C++ and Java evolved, but are not as purely object-oriented as Smalltalk is.
Either it is not a good model in its entirety or time is not right for it. (though I believe it's the former)
The Now Ritual Shirky Link (Score:2)
A useful antidote to the hype.
Except he's terribly wrong... (Score:2)
... as pointed out [ftrain.com] by the incomparable Paul Ford.
Don't believe everything you read - this Slashdot story is a great example.
Not so fast there... (Score:2)
Clay Shirky has written an excellent article about why the Semantic Web ain't gonna work [shirky.com]. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's a thought-provoking read nevertheless.
This is news? (Score:2)
Given that the semantic web has been in development for years, and that the opinions(*) have long ago finished forming, I'm a little confused as to what this is doing on a news site.
(*) Said opinions break down roughly thus:
1% -- This is an amazing new way of percieving and connecting data that will revolutionize computing in the future.
9% -- This is a waste of time, a clearly impossible task that would seem of interest only to a certain breed of dysfunctional academics.
90% -- Huh?
Visual Web (Score:1)
The assumptions that are beneath English are difficult to work with, and in reality wrong. When I say "I am a baseball player" the meaing is quite different than that sentence protrays.
As mentioned by another commentor, context is the most important element of
Wizard of OZ (Score:1)
Mod Parent Up (Score:1)
Re:no formal theory? get real. (Score:2, Informative)
There has been a considerable amount of work on ontology mapping within the knowledge engineering community, but the evolutionary aspects of ontologies have been largely overlooked. Ontology mapping is a harder problem than graph isomorphism, since classes from different ontologies may have extensions that overlap rather than cover each other. It's a difficult problem, certainly, but it's worth noting that game theory isn't applied here.
Game theory tends to appear more within the multi-agent systems commun
Whomever modded my topic as "Off Topic"... (Score:1)