Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

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.'"

Comments

Ontology

[dodongo]

I want to offer an alternative, as proposed by Victor Raskin at Purdue. I speak for neither Sergei Nirenburg nor Victor (who does enough talking for himself).

While this idea for more thorough, concise, and accurate searches is a good one, I would question whether embedding semantic tags into web pages is the way to go.

As outlined in Ontological Smenatics, there is an automated system of semantic processing already underway. Basically, it takes a text, then runs it through a parser, which looks up meanings in a lexicon, then reduces whatever translation it comes up with to a text-meaning representation (TMR), by pushing the concepts from the lexicon through an ontology / onomasticon / world-knowledge library. The TMR is basically the "pulp" of the semantics of the article, web page, book, or whatever it's been fed. It just contains the ideas, the things involved, and other relevant concepts, stripped of all other linguistic information.

TMR is great, becuase the TMR can be used then, by reversing the process and using the lexicon of another language, to translate a text from one language to another.

However, it seems to me that with the bits and pieces of the TMR stored in a search engine's index, this could be a huge boon for the search engine.

Instead of just trying to match keywords, by parsing the TMR of web pages and by parsing TMR of search strings, you no longer search for keywords, but keyconcepts.

The advantage to semantic searches / indexes by this implementation is manifold:

-Searches (and the web as a whole) will gain the richness Mr. Berners-Lee is advocating.

-Web authors will not be able to lie in their semantic tags, or otherwise misinform spiders what the page is about (remember tags?)

-No extra work is required in the actual construct of the web or *ML standards. The TMR is only generated and stored by the sites / processes that need it.

-Others?

Just an alternative solution, for fun :)