The Semantic Web Going Mainstream 110
Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.
Sorry, but it's not for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't like this idea. One good hack from the Russian MAFIA and the game would be over. All your eggs are belong to us, as it were.
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Cheers.
Maybe I'm just getting to old for this 'internets' thing.
Re:Sorry, but it's not for me. (Score:5, Funny)
With the Berners-Lee Semantic Web(tm), however, you would just type in "which Major League batter had the most RBIs in 1997?"
(Of course, most search engines will already pick out the relevant terms even if you typed that question in, but that doens't count because they don't do it *intelligently*.)
Re:Sorry, but it's not for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
So... What's an RBI then when it's at home?
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it's precisely in academic circles that the semantic web is already a reality
But this is precisely the problem with the semantic web - it's not grounded in reality (apologies for the poor logic pun). I'm not going to indulge in academic-bashing, having spent a fair amount of time wandering up and down ivory towers in my time, but the semantic web does not measure up to even a cursory cost-benefit analysis. It provides very little qualitative benefit over current search - especially for content providers, who unfortunately are the people it requires a huge commitment from.
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Apparently not. I missed that memo as well.
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Re:Sorry, but it's not for me. (Score:5, Funny)
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God damn that phrase!! (Score:1)
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I'm so unlucky as to have misread it as "Symantec Web"
OMG! Another Norton product!!!!!!
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What is more likley?
A large company doesn't keep back ups.
A person like you or me doesn't keep back ups.
Now this varies from person to person, but I would usually bet a company would have far greater resources into backing up data. Of course, I have been unpleasantly surprised before on this matter.
Or for that matter... Wouldn't it be easier for the Russian Mafia to hack your average unsecured windows computer and blow away your data that way?
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I'm insignificant, a nobody, and no target at all. A site used by hundreds of thousands or even millions, on the other hand - now that's a target. A well-defended target you'd hope, but a target nonetheless.
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So Gmail is better? (Score:2, Insightful)
no ads please (Score:4, Informative)
but even without ads the article is very shallow. how is it "semantic" web exactly?
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An example would be going over my finances at the end of the month. Right now I get either a paper statement, or log into each account, and then copy numbers over to Quicken. This would allow me to set up Quicken to automat
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Presumably they want to research how to trick people into providing markup/classification (that current 'AI' with a lack of reading comprehension/natural language competence (ever come across a decent 'automagic' translation?) fails to deliver) and sell the results for corporations to use. Seen this way, it is a cornerstone to the advancement of wealth creation, adding an exciting new semantic dimension to 'Rich Web Clients' (of Spivack).
CC.
Terms and Conditions (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't use their service for commercial purposes; how mainstream can it be?
not strong enough (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, like in... (Score:1)
Attack of the Misunderstood Acronyms! (Score:5, Informative)
Yikes. That's horrible.
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Even better... On their site they say
http://www.twine.com/about [twine.com] and there's a great section about Web 3.0 here [radarnetworks.com]
It's great for a laugh... until you realize that by this time next year we'll probably be on Web 10.0
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Relevant (Score:2, Interesting)
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Here's a futuristic tailored smeantic search example!
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Imagine you could simply query things like: Find me an appointement with a dentist that takes my insurance, has good ratings and lives near where I live. From your personal information (your calendar, where you live), public information (consummer ratings on the dentists, maps, i
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Glad to see somebody here "get it" when it comes to the Semantic Web.
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What's exciting about twine is that it appears to be based on W3C standards (RDF/OWL et al), but doesn't require knowledge to be engineered. Can't wait to see where this goes..
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All it takes is for the data published on the internet to be ** STOLEN **
There, I fixed if for you. In your specific example, you have:
- your demographic information
- your insurance information
- the dentist's schedule
and other bits and pieces exposed. Ask yourself. Do you want to go there?
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> "All it takes is for the data published on the internet to be ** STOLEN **"
Careful, I heard somewhere that if you publish information to this thing called the web, other people can see it too!
Jeez, it's relatively straightforward to only make available information that you *want* the world to see. If you don't want your mother's maiden name to be public information, take it off your homepage/blog/profile. The only diffe
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The kind of order you're seeking to impose... its impossible.
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I'm consulting at the biomedical informatics department of a major midwestern pediatric hospital. We're in the chase trying to make semantic web work. In sort, we're focused on the Data. There are at least six different well-known formats for representing Subject-Predicate-Object and the temptation is to get hung up on the markup and forgetting "It's the data stupid."
There's an old saying: Astronomy isn't about telescopes. Of course astronomy would be severely crippled without telescopes; the goal of ast
"Fighting the hype problem"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, I understand that managing expectations is important, but let's not lose sight of what this article really is.
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No! Load More On! (Score:2)
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You got it all wrong. Web 2.0 is "You make all the content, they get all the revenue". Web 3.0 is going to be The Semantic Web. Web 4.0 will, like Winamp 4.0, be skipped in favour of Web 5.0 where users provide the content, search engines look at the ads while grabbing the content and returning it, processed and summarized, to said users. This will also perfectly integrate with GWEI [gwei.org] and similar projects for other search engines!
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Flashback (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly some new meaning of semantic Web here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hype alert (Score:2, Interesting)
There's just no way to make it work every time (Score:1)
I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)
While methods are available to do categorization based on either static or learned heuristics, they are less than perfect (think about Safe Search in Google images -- it works decently, but definitely not perfectly). In fact, just parsing a single English sentences can be a difficult task for computers (if the sentence doesn't fall into a context free grammar). So the best we can probably hope Twine to do is categorize based off of word frequency (okay, they probably use some higher order stats).
Whenever I read about a new semantic technology, I always think of Wordnet (developed by Miller, who is the same guy responsible for the study showing we can remember 5-7 digits). Wordnet was developed as a database for the hierarchy of all words. Words are defined by their relationship to other words.
While it's a great idea, and useful for some projects, it also far from perfect, as words do not in the end have a static relationship to each other. The semantic web in the end relies on a static relationship between words (either through common usage or through a relationship through words).
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They do: that's ChaCha.
They could wear glasses and have their hair in a bun, that only comes down when they're overwhelmed by desire for a games play, Star Trek watching geek?
Okay, maybe not that part.
I'm already using the Semantic Web (Score:5, Insightful)
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(Hey, it works for me quite a bit!)
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Goofy project (Score:5, Insightful)
So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine? It's the kind of project only plausible to those who know very little of the basic background well-accepted by experts in the pertinent adjacent fields. That one or two big names from the success of the syntactical www either aren't familiar with or don't accept core knowledge from linguistics and philosophy of language is finally no different than Thomas Edison working for years on a machine to talk to ghosts: brilliance in one area most often doesn't translate into other areas in which you have no background - and even more rarely into areas where nobody knows how it would be done.
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The simple fact is, computers can't do "natural language recognition". They can't READ. And they definitely can't glean meaning from contextual clues. All of which are necessary for the so-called "semantic web" to work well.
Essentially, these guys are pretending that they have a working artifical intelligence. Which they don't. No one does.
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Artificial Intelligence is a very different field from Semantic Web. The technology for SemWeb is here now, AI is still a ways off, I will admit.
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There have been various attempts to tame the semantic beast - formalized hierarchies being the most successful in conjunction with the advancement of scientific thought, and more recently less formalized meta-tagging systems.
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It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax."
That's right- we get semantics from interpretation.
So why don't we give PR puff pieces like this the same warm reception we give to the latest announcement of a perpetual motion machine?
Because the right syntax can give to a computer very helpful clues towards productive interpretations. Data- which is just "syntax"- helps to drive computers to more effectively interpret other, related data all the freaking time. That's not what kills the semantic web idea.
What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.
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There may be other issues as well, because the whole idea seems to hinge on correct and honest mark-up. It doesn't sound very resilient anyway. So really, it sounds like it's a project whose main aim at trying to eliminate hard work when it's eventually going to have to be done anyway.
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I would gladly trade places with P
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For example, the following chunk of code explicitly defines the creator, title, description, and date of an audio file. Because it has been specifically marked up, and IF we can all agree to use the Dublin core namespace for describing that type of d
Could use Lojban (Score:1)
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Vagueness (Score:1)
What's it all about? (Score:2)
I for one (Score:1, Redundant)
Too many buzzwords. too little content (Score:2)
I looked at the Twine web site [twine.com], and I can't figure out what they're actually doing. It's all buzzwords. There's a video of the Twine guy speaking at the "Web 2.0 Summit". [blip.tv] The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.
Apparently the "natural language recognition" seems to consist of recognizing names of people, products, and companies. The examples were "Tim Bernars-Lee" and "Google", which are so unique that they're easy. But would it wo
Re:Too many buzzwords. too little content (Score:5, Funny)
The video is useless; the guy is doing a demo, but the video only shows the face of the speaker, not the demo.
let's do some semantic here: useless, demo, speaker. Anwser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bubble [wikipedia.org]
Cool, the good old days are back, time to make some easy money :-).
Build your own Semantic Web Apps using a free API (Score:1)
Some very cool apps have already been built on top of it like http://newsatseven.com/ [newsatseven.com], http://www.squadinfo.com/ [squadinfo.com], http://www.optevi.net/newstracker [optevi.net] and many others.
It's not the "real" semantic web - but it's an open-access starting point.
The also have a firefox plugin at http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ [clearforest.com] that does semantic analy
Mod up (was: semantic web without the buzzwords) (Score:1)
Here's Hoping It Is As Stillborn As Rest of SW (Score:1)
My tin foil hat says... (Score:1)