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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.'"
So, once this is off the ground, who wants to bet that the answer really is, 42?
Seriously though, this could be really cool, but I imagine that this could have some very adverse effects on privacy given the amount of information that finds itself on the web. Items that are linked by obscurity in disperate places would be easily linked into a single profile (If the stuff he's talking about isn't primarily smoke and mirrors). Either way, like any powerful technology, it will have both good and bad consequences. Here's hoping for the good...
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
and has been for over a decade (or more).
...when the man himself signed up for a user account. w00t!
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Well, beyond the "knowledge management"-type mumbo jumbo, anyway. Some basic definitions are here, here, and .
This is to insure against a monoculture that is so disastrous in computer circles as demonstrated by the numerous security failings of Windows...
See the original here.
:-) I've never read any of them, I only know this Berners-Lee fellow from the headlines.
Actually Slashdot posts this article over and over again every few months, with basically the same headline (sometimes "and" sometimes "on" sometimes "Tim" sometimes not). Kinda bizarre really.
As we all know, Al Gore is the hero of the Web's creation story.
This always gets asked - and a partial answer is right here.
Eclipse plugins, visualization tools... there's some good stuff there.
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Except for China, they get their own semantic web with special semantic filters in place that semantically keep their citizens under semantic control.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
If you'd like an opposing view, make sure to read Clay Shirky's take on the semantic web.
A topic I posted a few years ago is perfectly relevant to this submission: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92504&cid=7953 441
"...enabling computers to extract meaning from far-flung information as easily as today's Internet simply links individual documents."
i wonder if this could be used for a computer's local file system as well. I know microsoft is working on this (WinFS or OFS or whatever it's supposed to be called), but it would be damn awesome to apply this not just to the internet.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
The extra work required to put data into a standard data format won't be done. People can't bother making their pages w3c complaint (even slashdot). The second problem is that data formats can rarely be agreed upon by a large community. Look at how many calendar event and news feed formats there are.
Exactly.
And here is the problem: what "the rest of us" are going to do when Google goes south? Either collapses under its own weight or finally broken by its corporate overlords?
Can't put all the eggs in one basket. The only sane future is the one with unified, object-driven search and retrieval methods distributed amongst information consumers and producers.
The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.
Google identifies relationships between data using only on the links between pages containing the data.
The Semantic web represents relationships between data based on metadata (i.e. data about data). This is a far more powerful way to describe the meaning of data.
works for me.
Maybe, but that doesn't mean its the best way to accomplish what you are trying to do.
I'm so tired of Semantic trying to take over all the security tools. Are they now trying to take over the Internet? I mean really, Semantic Antivirus totally sucks ass big-time!!! And don't get me started on Semantic's SystemWorks tool and how bad it blows!
Oh, wait a minute...
...a team in Redmond is tasked to make sure that Microsoft own the "single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone."
Ulrik
Because he chose not to capitalize commercially on the Web? How is the measure of your altriusm the measure of your heroism? I understand that many people DO feel that way, but nobody has ever really explained WHY heroism is a necessary consequence of altriusm. Why is someone who makes a profit necessarily evil? The man who invented a corrugated-cardboard coffee-cup holder holds a patent on it; every Starbucks coffee sold puts a penny in his pocket. Why is that wrong?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As has been stated many times, content producers will spoof semantic data just like they used to with the META tag...which is why no one uses the META tag anymore. Relevance algorithms take into account link analysis and statistical text analysis to provide a much more truthful representation of what data is there. Sorry Tim.
...from the minds of Alan Kay, David Smith, David Reed, and others...
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
The fact that Tim has been trying for 15 years to sell this idea with little success indicates that he approach is insufficient. He is pitching the idea just like a startup would, giving cool examples and everything. But in practice, all he is doing is proposing and overseeing standards. Developing standards for an idea is not what is required to prove that an idea works. Standards should follow successful technology, not vice versa. You need to have companies that make products professionally and offer complete solutions (i.e. make it work real-life situations). Doing it for a very simple example that he quotes ("find pictures taken on sunny days") itself is a big, big deal. Perhaps Tim should get involved with companies in this field as an advisor/consultant. You know, there are enough smart people out there who could develop the standards. But very few people with his name and recognition to truly ignite commercial interest in his ideas.
Here is an account that predicts that Google will leverage its search results to create a Semantic Web. I see this as a distinct possibility. Especially Google leveraging its search results to help people buy and sell stuff.
And this is what makes me wonder if this will amount to much more then an interested research project for grad students. In order for the SemWeb to amount to anything useful, everyone is going to have to include the metadata necessary to integrate their data into the Semantic Web. How's that going to work? Who's going to make it work?
...have the words "Don't Panic" prominently displayed?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
The common thread to the Semantic Web is that there's lots of information out there--financial information, weather information, corporate information--on databases, spreadsheets, and websites that you can read but you can't manipulate. The key thing is that this data exists, but the computers don't know what it is and how it interrelates. You can't write programs to use it.
IMHO, the problem with the Semantic Web is the same problem that evolved the Web from a linked knowledge store to a commercial-driven directory.
Yes, it would be nice if all data were tagged and understandable, but let's be honest: the commercialization (and its result: exploitation by marketers) of the web would certainly spill into the Semantic Web, and so Berners-Lee's vision would be once again ruined by 1) incorrect/misleading tagging, 2) competing standards and 3) out and out fraud.
I assume what Berners-Lee really wants is for a machine to truly understand that, using his example: something is a calendar, and that you are interetsed in it, and that you should add the event to your schedule and then book a flight for it.
But the chances are -- one day -- machines will be able to understand how data is typed by understanding the context around it (just as a human would go through the aforementioned process manually).
Obviously, this type of reading "comprehension" is a long ways off, but the "search engine wars" are resulting in a lot of mind power thrown at the problem of understand context. And I'm guessing it'll be a reality before anything as pure as the vision for the Semantic Web is realized.
(and to throw in a plug for my own copmaniy's attempt at understanding web context: theConcept).
I've been hearing noise about the semantic web, RDF, and what not for years now, and every time I do, the first thing that pops into my head is "Second System Effect".
He got lucky once, because he put together some tools that were simple and straightforward enough for people to pick it up quickly, thereby avoiding the fate of the dozens of other hypertext systems going back to the late 1980's.
Now, like all second systems, he wants to "do it right", over-engineering away all of the things that made the first one take off ...
Just my opinionated rant ...
This is an important point. Google computes the pagerank of a page based on the eigenvector of the web link matrix, which is a clever and usually effective approach. Unfortunately, each link only conveys a little bit of information. A link from page A to page B is assumed to be an endorsement of page B's relevance by page A. But what if you could add extra metadata to the links? Not just a URL and a human readable text label, but a machine readable label as well, like this?
If you could apply arbitrary attributes to web pages, google would have much better information to go on, and a user could specify the importance of certain attributes depending on what he/she is looking for.
-jim
Google's a hack. No, really, it tries to extract meaning from web pages that really aren't engineered to store that kind of information.
Google is also an application. The Semantic Web is all about building the infrastructure so applications like Google don't have to chase the holy grail of AI to become more than a hack. Think of the Semantic Web as the layer underneath Google.
The rest of us call this... GOOGLE.
Google searches undifferentiated text. In contrast, the semantic web is all about differentiating text by adding meta tags.
For example, the word "Hilton" on a web page is ambiguous. It could be a hotel, or a celebrity. Which is it? With the semantic web we'd know:
Of course, this is a fairly trivial example. A more meaningful example:
In the beginning, we had library card catalogs, with their painful attempts to index and cross-reference books. That works well in some areas, typically ones where names of people are significant. Attempts to apply the same approaches to technical papers worked less well.
There's a very elaborate classification system for patents. When you had to look through patents on paper or microfilm, it was essential. Now that we have full text search, it's used less and less.
A modern example of this approach is the ACM Taxonomy, a structure into which all computer science can be fitted. (As an exercise, try to put the current Slashdot stories into that taxonomy.) Nobody actually uses that taxonomy to find anything.
As to data interchangability, that's a separate issue, and more of a standards one. The big problem for publicly available data is that the cost of encoding the data is borne by different people than those who benefit from the encoding. Many companies don't like having all their product and pricing information easily searchable by price. (Froogle may change this, because Google has so much clout.)
I've spent some time dealing with public financial reporting. There's opposition to detailed disclosure in a standardized format. Many companies don't want their detailed information to be too easily analyzed. Embarassing results show up.
The future is better search engines, not user-created indexing data. As we've painfully learned, a search engine must look at the same data a human reader would, or it will be lied to. Lied to to the point of uselessness.
Trust is one of the major stumbling blocks of semantic applications and automatic knowledge management issues.
By your declaring such functionality to be an error of logic does not (in my view) make it less likely.
Back to my very example... the 'scams and cheats' property assertion of an online gamer against my account number is, by definition, a symantic inferrence. Unless a human jumps to the various links that make up the conclusion. Couple this with the very fact that my fictional search would be along the lines of 'transaction trust', the property does apply to the query.
Basically that is the point. It is broken beyond usable functionality. It cannot make the conclusions advertised. It can link to points to help a human create valid conclusions.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
And what happens when people start misusing the metadata like the current meta tags?
The Semantic Web just provides a method for expressing metadata. Maintaining the integrity of those expressions involves a different set of problems. Some of the solutions include trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.
If you have followed this little crazy guy that is me, you may have seen that most of today's computer problems are because modern operating systems offer nothing in the information management department.
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Remember the CVS story a couple of days before? it's information management: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123076&cid=10
WinFS is also about information management: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121101&cid=10
The story that the Evolution e-mail client offers the e-mail data as a data model separate from the application? another information management issue.
The web? information management issue.
Distributed databases? information management issue.
Web search engines? information management issue.
Windows search tool? information management issue.
The Windows registry? information management issue.
The unix etc directory? information management issue.
Enterprise workflows? again, an information management issue. That's why there is no general workflow solution accepted and used worldwide.
Dynamic web site contents? information management issue.
The semantic web? another information management issue!
As you can see, from the numerous examples given above, all that an operating system should do, but no one does, is that it must manage information instead of files. If that is coupled with a distributed networked environment, 90% of the world's software would be considered obsolete overnight and the productivity and fun from using computers will increase 10fold.
If any open source developer is reading this, you may contact me for a private discussion on the idea. THIS IS OPEN SOURCE'S BIGGEST CHANCE TO LEAD THE TECHNOLOGICAL RACE!
As you do note in your comments, however, it's not really doable without a good simulation of conceptual processing.
Still, every little bit helps. Certainly a "Semantic Web" would be more useful than the current one.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The semantic web sounds a little like a massively distributed Prolog program, with each separate semweb component defining a rule or relation, and each semweb-aware program just being a query into the environment... Other questions: how do you avoid redundancies, or pulling data you don't want, or keeping data confined to specific locales or interpretations, or keeping labels synced with the actual data? What prevents someone from declaring something foo when it's actually bar?
for data to be shared and recognized as distinct fields of information, won't there need to be standardization across all hosts in order to use the data in any comprehensible way?
ie. on host #1while on host #2 the same item is recognized as:
how will the semantic web describe and relate items which are recognized as an item for sale but under different labels?