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How Google Will Have Achieved The Semantic Web
alfaromeo points to a business feature (mysteriously available already) by one Paul Ford called "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web." So read on for a bit of potential history from five years in the future.
So I guess since ./ couldn't handle the past, and is failing miserably with the present, it will now resort to fortune-telling?
:)
Editors, could we at least keep the dupes down?
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
It happens one second, one day, one month, one year at a time. To speculate out that far in the tech world, where changes in tempo, fortune and direction are so common, is rather silly to me.
because all of the patents to do so were tied up between various companies that didn't want to cooperate with each other.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?
Not really, and XML is still such a recent development that to say "Remember when" is silly if not outright disengenuous. I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago. Can you name a information technology that reached anything like its full potential less than a decade after its first mention?
Don't quote me on this (seriously, because if you do, I will cut you), but I thought Microsoft was migrating to XML usage for a lot of their proprietary formats finally. I think it's a good idea, but then again, what if they patent their XML formats?
Yeah, just letting you know that XML is actually going somewhere.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
President Ashcroft==Scary as hell
You are not the customer.
I RTFA. Intriguing, but it would be a huge struggle for Google to become like anything in the article. There's too much money in having the right information at the right time.
XML is still getting more popular and more accepted with each passing month.
The biggest issues are that there are a few monstrous companies out there that want to control the standard of how information is shared, and mutate XML into some proprietary form that their company can control.
XML is a good thing, like most standards. Standards can fall short at times, especially when the uber-companies start trying to fight for control over them. I believe that this fight for control will do more to prevent the easy transfer of data, more than any problem with XML itself.
I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago
1986 was 18 years ago.
Even if it was less then 10 years ago, 10 years is a long time in Internet land. 10 years ago most people had barely even heard of the Internet.
I started off reading this and gradually got quite excited by the ideas presented.
About half way through I mistakenly thought I was reading an online copy of 1984.
The benifits of this happening sound fantastic. It just sounds very cool for everyone to be connected like that - which is what scares me even more. Here is an absolutely huge privacy concern; and it has me totally excited about the prospect of it happening.
Sorry to go slightly off topic, but it's things like this that worry me a lot, that a possible 1984 scenario could disguise itself so well that even a person like me - who is verging on (if not already there) being a member of the tin foil hat brigade - excited by the very idea of it.
"The flesh is willing but the spirit is weak" in English translates to "The meat is full of stars but the vodka is made of pinking shears" or suchlike in Russian.
The semantic web is a wonderful dream, but it is certainly going to take more than five years to become a reality. Like voice recognition, the semantic web requires a solution to the natural language problem to be implemented successfully. Don't hold your breath.
Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?
Nope. I remember a bunch of people with no clue hyping it up as such, but anybody actually involved with XML in any technical capacity, including the creators, understood that it was simply a standardised syntax for file formats. So-called pundits jumped on each others' bandwagons in touting it as some kind of miracle, but anybody who actually knew what they were talking about wouldn't make claims about XML that you reckon.
Looking at the resultant cars, who do you think had a better approach?
If you're just looking at the quality of the cars, then I'd say the Germans.
But maybe it's not quite that simple. I'm more concerned about who gets me what I want with the least amount of cost or effort.
However, a nice infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean you'll produce the best products. The Germans may have nice roads, but it's because the roads are heavily subsidized by taxes.
The French may have bad roads, but they cost less in taxes. If can just buy a car with good suspension you'll be ok. If you want to save money, you can deal with the bumpy roads.
And both countries have alternatives to cars: The excellent (but subsidized) rail systems.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Surely the best data stucture would be normal web pages with a system that can understand natural language
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
"Of course, what's going on is not understanding, but logic, like you learn in high school"
Now, that's a stand you might take -- although i'd say that a meaningful majority of the people who think about these things for a living disagree. But the 'of course' is completely unwarranted -- this might be the most-discussed philosophical issue of the last 30 years, and it's dismissed here because apparently understanding means 'what humans do when they synthesize information, but not what machines do when they perform a very similar activity'.
like i say, this is nitpicking, maybe. it's a nice article. but i think that it's important, if we're going to make 'of course' statements about the relationship between syntax, semantics, and what understanding is, that we should remain cognizant of the fact that this is a terribly complicated issue without a whole lot of 'of course' about it. that is, i'm not clear on what grounds the author concludes that the semweb is not understanding.
god is just pretend.
On intranets it is a different issue - a company can create templates and enforce their truthful use internally.
Speaking from experience in studying semantics and natural language processing, these ideas aren't far off. However, I know of people who are starting their business based on semantic searches. I'd give them an edge over Google only because Google would have to re-gear from their present PageRank method while the other fellows can start from scratch.
(mysteriously available already)
No kidding, not only is it available this side of the decade, it's been online for two years and was even linked from a comment on this very site.
Well, the dotcom world hasn't moved that much since then, but by the same token, the semantic web hasn't really made much progress either.
Clay Shirky has some wisely pessimistic views on the subject. For example, he cites the W3C's own example in promoting the semantic web:
Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?
A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]
As Shirky observes, One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.
Sure. HTTP. HTML. Gopher. Napster's protocol.
The real problem with XML is that it's just a really verbose way of doing what people were doing with delimited files (edi files, .csv, etc) for ages. And then people try to create even more verbose equivalents of CORBA on top of it. Ugh.
The one sole advantage XML has is all those secretaries-turned-"HTML Programmers" understand it.
If there was a sentence in the article that proved it was rubbish this would be it. XML is not just slightly popular, it is now the defacto structured data representation. There is no competitor, there is simply no other format that is used in new protocol standards. Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.
RDF on the other hand is a not very good idea to start with that has not exactly improved with the years. All RDF is in principle is typed set theory logic, so instead of trying to define a new set of semantics why not simply import Z or VDM wholesale?
Second problem with RDF is that it is really hard for a grad student to write an operational or denotational semantics for a programming language, a field that has only been worked on solidly for thrity years or so. So now we are expected to be defining semantics for everything???
The way that semantics get attached to syntax is through use. Use in this case means a program. I don't know that there is any RDF application out there that is likely to go much of anywhere soon.
I think that the way to get to a semantic web is completely different. You start from XML documents rather than attempt to change what the world chose for syntax. You build simple operational vocabularies of common terms for use in catalogues and make it really easy for people to categorize their work within those catalogues. You take as your starting premise that any structure of knowledge is going to be a work in progress.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
1986
"That's less than ten years ago."
Less than 10 years huh? What, are we still in the mid 90's?
XML doesn't mean that computers will be able to classify information based on semantics, it just packages data so that the computers don't have to do that work. Somebody still has to mark up the information.
"If A is a friend of B, then B is a friend of A,"
should read, as we all know, "If A is a friend of B, then B is a fan of A."
If they can't even get this simple logic right, I won't trust the rest of the article either.
Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.
/. before, but this near takes the cake. DNS using XML?
I've heard some RETARDED statements on
Whatever you are smoking, I want some - 'cause it's clearly some REALLY GOOD SHIAT!
Given that:
1) DNS is a protocol, not a data format, and
2) XML is a data format, not a protocol, and
3) DNS is incredibly light and efficient, and
4) DNS has already proven that it scales well to just about any size, and
5) XML offers no particular advantage, since you could serve DVD ISOs over the DNS, and
6) moving to an "XML PROTOCOL" format would require the update of every single DNS server on the face of the earth, many of which are still running Bind 8.x, and some are still running BIND 4.X for god's sake,
I consider this to be HIGHLY UNLIKELY(tm) !!!!!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.