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Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser
Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser?
The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."
The question is about whether we really need a World Wide Web that looks like Wikipedia with links to every word and generally just a jumbled mess of blue and purple text. No matter how you cut it, the problem lies in having too much information immediately available.
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space.
Or a testament to people's inability to understand new paradigms.
Or a testament of the inability of the paradigm's creator to get people to understand it's necessity.
Much work on the semantic web has been with n3
N3 is a superset of rdf, allowing for quoting of groups of triples (known a formulae). In n3, you can say things about groups of n3 triples, including about their trustworthiness.
For instance, you can say:essentially saying that the formula which is the semantics of the given document if of a class
There are many who are very wary on n3 for precisely the same reasons.
Note that I will always plug n3, given that I'm heavily involved with cwm.
Statistical text analysis and link analysis are a superior technique because it presumes the author could be BSing. The entire document must contribute to the corresponding query value, not just keyphrases which could or could not be true. This is why Google is a $50 billion company and no RDF firm ever will be.