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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.
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The Semantic Web Going Mainstream

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  • Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by cHiphead ( 17854 )
      Anyone that uses the word 'semantic' with 'web' should be pointed at and laughed at, then perhaps hit in the face with a brick. Keep trying, marketeers, you'll find a new way to game your hits and get another easy payday sooner or later. Nubs.

      Cheers.

      Maybe I'm just getting to old for this 'internets' thing.
      • by UbuntuDupe ( 970646 ) * on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:26AM (#21157373) Journal
        Okay, that is *not* fair. The Semantic Web would have untold benefits for humanity. For example: if you wanted to find out which Major League batter had the most RBIs in 1997, you would have to spend three -- perhaps four -- minutes learning how to use an internet search engine.

        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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by DocDJ ( 530740 )

          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.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • by yoder ( 178161 ) *
              "So the academic world isn't a reality?"

              Apparently not. I missed that memo as well.
            • by DocDJ ( 530740 )
              Hmmm, either I meant (a) "the academic world isn't a reality" (which would clearly be a ludicrous claim), or (b) something else. Guess what? It's (b). The semantic web is not grounded in the real world in that it does not take into account that real people (as opposed to the kind of people that exist in research funding proposals) generally make decisions about how much time or money they invest in something based on the benefit they expect to obtain from that effort. It just seems hugely unlikely that peop
    • by butterwise ( 862336 ) <butterwise AT gmail> on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:19AM (#21157289)

      Sorry, but it's not for me.
      Anti-semantic...
      • What's he going to do? Make web-pages wear yellow semantic markup?
      • I don't think he was being anti-semantic, he was just saying that newish tag systems should be segregated off into their own neighborhoods, separate from the rest of the internet, and possibly flagged with a special star.
    • I always misread it as the "Sementic Web" and I get really excited that more interesting ways to look at pr0n are on their way to the internets.
      • by Whiteox ( 919863 )
        You're lucky! At least you thought "PORN!"
        I'm so unlucky as to have misread it as "Symantec Web"
        OMG! Another Norton product!!!!!!
    • One good hack from the Russian MAFIA and the game would be over.

      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?
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tim C ( 15259 )

        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?
        But why would they?

        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.
    • Question: Where dose the Mafia come in this and why would they want to have, destroy or hold hsotage bits of random people's online memories? I may not be one of them (maybe I am but can't say so 'cause they'd kill me if I did), but I'd suspect their interests being more along smuggling and distributing things, ending unfriendly people's lives and so on.
    • Hold on so you are saying that any hosted service is unsafe then? What about all the people who use hosted email, or hosted collaboration, or hosted file servers? Sure if a hacker gets into anything it's unsafe. Heck even enterprise software that is locally hosted is at risk. Geez, if we're that terrified, let's not even use computers or the Internet at all then. Twine is no more at risk than Gmail, Facebook, Salesforce or any other online service that holds information that is not all public. Get real.
  • no ads please (Score:4, Informative)

    by randuev ( 1032770 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:02AM (#21157099)
    http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19627 [technologyreview.com] for those who don't want the ads
    but even without ads the article is very shallow. how is it "semantic" web exactly?
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Intron ( 870560 )
      The W3C part [w3.org] is to add semantic information to web pages and other data so that you can use it in multiple applications (like twine, I guess). Right now, data I get from a web page is only good for me to look at, but with semantic markup I could automatically import it into other uses.

      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
    • by foobsr ( 693224 ) *
      how is it "semantic" web exactly?

      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.
  • by Mateo_LeFou ( 859634 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:04AM (#21157113) Homepage
    "access and use the Site and electronically copy, (except where prohibited without a license) and print to hard copy portions of the Site Materials for your informational, non-commercial and personal use only"

    Can't use their service for commercial purposes; how mainstream can it be?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:07AM (#21157159)
    Sorry folks, but twine just isn't gonna cut it. We need something sturdier. Someone needs to start a similar project called 'ducttape'.
  • From the site:

    Twine is a website where people can dump information that's important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos.
    and then web site does the semantic part... Revolutionary or what?
  • by the linux geek ( 799780 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:10AM (#21157193)
    "Written with the Semantic Web Standards, called W3C, in mind."

    Yikes. That's horrible.
    • The write-up may be a bit confusing, but I'm pretty sure they're referring to the Semantic Web [wikipedia.org] as an extension of the web as proposed by W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and not trying to hijack the acronym for themselves.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MrMunkey ( 1039894 )

      Even better... On their site they say

      Twine is one of the first mainstream applications of the Semantic Web, or what is sometimes referred to as Web 3.0.

      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

    • There's also a Web Ontology Language whose acronym is OWL. I propose coining the word "Anagrym" for such instances.
      • by nuzak ( 959558 )
        Anagrym. I love it. OWL and ISO (International Organization for Standards) would be examples of TALs: Three Letter Anagryms.
    • don't be so critical it's not bad for machine generated English language text.
  • Relevant (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 )
    I know we're all supposed to be lubed up over "Web 2.0" and "blogging" and "social networking", but for the Internet users out there who ARENT 15 year old emo kids, how is "the semantic web" relevant?

    /yes, there's a whiff of irony about posting this to Slashdot
    //Slashdot = old Usenet
    ///rn FTW
    • by Anonymous Coward
      as internet user the idea could be useless, but as computer scientist you can have a master degree working with semantic web, rdf, etc, since the idea is not practical, and fuzzy, you can publish, go to conferences, and be associate professor.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      u mean matrix lovin kids:

      Here's a futuristic tailored smeantic search example!

      Semantic search:#> sem.search s1 = Kung_Fu +online_course +display=practical Layout +embedded=video +moves=kicking +armchair=relaxed_position + muscles.linked(search(0)) + 3d.harness=on +holographic.image_projector=on +environment=O2;
      s1;
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Arthur B. ( 806360 )
      The search engines are currently still mostly syntaxic. Look for a word, see pages matching that word, in a more or less relevant order... This means you have to play trick games with search engines in order to find what you want...

      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
      • 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, information from de dentist office, from your insurance etc) a semantic web search engine could provide you with an answer.

        Glad to see somebody here "get it" when it comes to the Semantic Web.
        • by maharg ( 182366 )
          psykocrime, I totally agree. The possibilities of semweb are really quite stunning. A few months back I posted a semweb 'use case' at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233445&cid=18993283 [slashdot.org]

          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.. :o)
      • All it takes is for the data published on the internet to be *structured*

        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?

        • >> "All it takes is for the data published on the internet to be *structured*"
          > "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
        • You don't need to expose that information to the whole world, only to the search engine or the application doing the matching. Of course, the search engine could be compromised or it could itself abuse your information. Still you remain free not to use it, you can ask to see only public information and match it with your agenda yourself, or you could use local sofwtares. Eventually, strong encryption and reputation mechanism should enforce better private information security in the future. For example you c
      • And all it takes for World Peace is for people to be "rational".

        The kind of order you're seeking to impose... its impossible.
    • I'm relatively certain that most fifteen year old "emo kids" don't hold computer science masters degrees, running from conference to conference to give talks on changing the nature of computing using the web, in-between friending classmates on facebook.
    • 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

  • by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:33AM (#21157469) Journal
    FTA (second page):

    It's still too early to know if Twine will be successful with consumers, says Tony Shaw, president of Semantic Universe, an organization committed to raising awareness of semantic technologies in business and consumer settings. Success will not simply depend on making the technology work, but also on managing people's expectations of the technology, he says. "It's about fighting the hype problem."
    Hmm. Let's fight the hype problem by publishing more hype. And maybe if we include a statement saying we're fighting hype, people will assume this reformatted press release isn't hype.

    Sure, I understand that managing expectations is important, but let's not lose sight of what this article really is.
    • Why don't they just give their own content the metatag "non-hype"? ;-)
    • Every technology that is going to be used in the industry has to go through a hype phase first. I first noticed this with C++ and Object Oriented programming. The hype was that OOP would revolutionize the industry. A bunch of PhBs across the land saw this blurb and said to their engineers "From now on we use C++ and Object Oriented programming!" The engineers went off and did it (Generally badly because the PhBs spent the training budget on a summer cottage in Italy) until they started to get the hang of it
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by darthflo ( 1095225 )

        Maybe they can integrate it into Web 2.0...

        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!

    • by lhorn ( 528432 )
      Sounded like a good idea, organizing content thru metainformation across different formats. But I began to be wary at "leveraging" and they lost me totally with "consumer". I will not voluntarily have anything to do with anybody who regards people as consumers. Seems like another "Intelligent agent" to me. I'll stick with Google for a while, they do use metainformation and seems to find information when I need it.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by YGingras ( 605709 )

      Let's fight the hype problem by publishing more hype.
      Of course, it builds hype resistance. Historical evidences show that it worked for IPv6 and Duke Nukem Forever.
  • Flashback (Score:5, Interesting)

    by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:34AM (#21157471)
    While reading TFA I had a flashback to reading a 90's era ASP press release. "Ohhh... Shiny and pointless!"
  • by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:37AM (#21157505)
    Unless I've missed some whole new sub-branch, semantic web to me means marking it up properly to give meaning to the various page elements via correct tags and microformats. This is just an overgrown agregator.
    • Deadly accurate... mod parent up!
    • Actually you did miss the sub-branch of what is now referred to as the Semantic Web [wikipedia.org]. Semantic (X)HTML tags like <strong> or emphasis provide better readability targeted directly to human interpreters while this new Semantic Web targets humans through aggregators of knowledge (and thus needs to be machine-read and -interpretable.
  • Hype alert (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jandersen ( 462034 )
    This article is crap - however, the idea is not entirely hot air, even though it is being touted as 'the next, big thing', which I very much doubt it will be. I think the 'semantic web' is trying to solve a non-existent problem; we're not suffering from 'information overload' - the net has just been filled up with useless rubbish, like adverts, SPAM, entertainment and adverts. And did I mention adverts? Fortunately it is not necessary to 'manage' any of that - all you need is to be able to avoid it, which e
  • I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by abes ( 82351 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @10:47AM (#21157619) Homepage
    While I am a fan of the "esoteric field of machine learning", as the article mentions, I am also well aware of the countless of disappointments so far (thus no AI..). There have been many designs that can tackle toy problems, but nothing yet that has been able to handle large corpuses of text so far. The big problem being is that to really be able to do proper categorization the program must understand what it's reading. Which, again, requires some type of intelligence.

    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).
    • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )
      Why not just have a large cube farm of women sitting there reading search engine requests, doing a look up of the information and then directing customer to information? 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?
      • Why not just have a large cube farm of women sitting there reading search engine requests, doing a look up of the information and then directing customer to information?

        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.
  • by progprog ( 1016317 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @11:01AM (#21157767) Homepage
    <insightful>Let's see if it works on Slashdot.</insightful>
    • Your tags are formatted incorrectly. It should be

      *please mod insightful, please mod insightful*
      and it goes only at the end of the text.

      (Hey, it works for me quite a bit!)
  • Goofy project (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wytcld ( 179112 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @11:05AM (#21157807) Homepage
    It's well-known in linguistics and philosophy that "You don't get semantics from syntax." It's well-known in computer science that computers are syntactical. It's well-known in recent business history that all startups claiming they'd produce "expert systems" or "artificial intelligence" in which computer systems would, despite these accepted truths, perform semantic feats have miserably failed to live up to their claims.

    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.
    • Exactly.

      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.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by maharg ( 182366 )
        .. and 640k ought to be enough for anyone ! lol

        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.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Humans don't even get semantics right consistently. In many cases there is no one 'right' meaning for any given collection of symbols. It all resides within the human skull, and is ever changing over time - and is reflected in how languages and symbology morph through the centuries.

      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.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jpfed ( 1095443 )

      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.

      • 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.

        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.
    • by MikeFM ( 12491 )
      I won't quite agree with you. While I do agree that every atempt I've seen so far for artificial intelligence to classify random data has been sort of lame I don't think it's an impossible task. It's merely a task that requires more memory and processor power than we've yet got available. I've seen some pretty decent AI stuff for classifying smaller groups of data so I think it's only a matter of time before a computer can classify most data that a human could classify. I think that's a point too - often we
    • Your post reminded me of a ST:TNG episode ("Ship in a bottle"), where Prof. Moriarty, a holodeck creation, somehow 'automagically' attains self-awareness and becomes a sentient human being, wishing to get off the holodeck and into the 3D world that Picard and his crew inhabit, but finds it to be an impossible task, even though he shakes down the enterprise after he gets a little annoyed with how little progress the crew has made with helping him get off the ship's holodeck.

      I would gladly trade places with P
    • I mostly agree with your comment--the sentiment is definitely right. I'll just add that there is a field called formal semantics, which consists in building models of and, importantly for the discussion here, making rules that describe the semantics of languages. Now, this is most easily accomplished with artificial languages, where the semantics are clear and precise (and usually quite a bit more orderly than in natural languages) but there has been work in using this with natural languages as well. Lon
    • In what sense are computers "syntactical" and the human brain "semantic"?
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by porter235 ( 413926 )
      What you seem to fail to recognize, is that the semantic web is not about teaching computers how to analyze our language (syntax) to extract semantics, but rather us agreeing on how to add syntax to our our data so that the computer can understand the semantics.

      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
  • Lojban is unambiguous and much better suited to this than Spanish or English. Sure, you can make English as precise as possible--but most of written English is not. I don't see how you can have a semantic web when the semantics aren't clearly defined. Lojban, parsable like Java, makes it truly possible.
    • by nuzak ( 959558 )
      Lojban has a ridiculously prescriptive grammar, and an inability to cope with ambiguity. Instead of adding qualifiers in a nondestructive way, it simply forbids ambiguity. Really expressive, yeah. Hell, many people can't even legally say their own NAME in Lojban.
  • I went to the Twine site to find out what it was all about but I just got bombarded with meaningless buzzwords and technodrivel. This is what you tend to get from people who want to sound cutting edge but haven't got a clue, so I concluded that they didn't really know what it was all about either.
  • I for one (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Crazy Taco ( 1083423 )
    I for one wait with Clay Shirkey to welcome our "devestatingly intelligent" machine searching overlords!
  • 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

  • All might be interested in taking a look at http://sws.clearforest.com/ [clearforest.com]. These guys offer the high-end natural language processing that Twine claims as a simple API available to all.

    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

  • Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.
    Why? It never had a chance; just let it die, please.
  • This is away for the gov'ment to get all the info in one place and to get you to put it there voluntarily. I bet there is a clause somewhere in the user agreement that gives them permission to access and use your content. You know in order to properly catagorize it.

You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.

Working...