Slashdot Mirror
University Launches Semantic Web Interface
kv9 writes "The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject."
I doubt er could Slashdot the Southampton Uni pages...still working fine for me.
From TFA:
Imagine more than Google
Imagine a better iTunes
Imagine Google on iTunes
Perhaps my early brain development was flawed, because I'm at a total loss to imagine what a "Google on iTunes" would be like or even what that means.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier.
mSPace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject. Click Here
Dr Monica Schraefel headed the research project, and put together a demonstration based on a search for information about classical music. She contrasts the semantic web approach with that of Google or iTunes, both of which return long lists of links or tracks.
This is useful up to a point, Schraefel argues, but supposing you don't actually know much about classical music: how much would you learn from these searches? The semantic web interface, meanwhile, brings together audio, text, links, and images about the domain, in this case classical music, in a way that people can explore the subject more fully. Wrapping an mSpace around the data allows the user to preview music, learn about the history of each composer and so on.
The researchers have applied the same framework to film (through IMDB.com) and academic research, and say it can be applied to any subject. They have released the framework to SourceForge so that other developers can take the basic ideas further.
There is a demo of the classical music mSpace running here for those with Mozilla based browsers. More information on the project is here. ®
karma whore? did you even visit the article? Its hosted on an academic server, and seems fine for me.
... And why is this better than the normal web? I have to click more to find what I want and it's not in any greater detail than that of the web.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
...interestingly, the demo won't run on IE (at least, the versions I've tried, being IE 6 on default settings). Perhaps this is a sign of things to come - more and more applications just not running on IE, and preferring FireFox / Mozilla?
inferious? cynsical? they must not require english courses in your sociology program.
there are plenty of links in the mirrored article to other resources.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"I don't know what kind of music i like, but when i hear it i know it". Thats a problem we often have. To have a possible solution for this would be really great.
People refer to the "semantic web" in a way that implies that there's an underlying meaning to everything which can be brought together somehow... which, I guess... is fine.
What I don't find fine is that this interface doesn't somehow derive meaning from documents and bring that meaning together, it's simply an interface to a hierarchical information store. Do we need a new name for that, or would "a bunch of windows that are interdependent" be fine for people who aren't being poseurs?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
A stack or queue of filters, with select box GUI, and text+gfx output at the end. (oh, and potentially sound clips - edgy!)
The only "innovation" I can see is that you can add + remove individual filters. Which is not, so to speak, going to launch rockets...
I recal looking at a system (in java) that allowed overlay of viewports (little square windows) onto a graphic to add + remove filters (in the photoshop sense in this case). You could drag around these viewports and overlay them to get a venn-diagram like effect with filters (real time, over the web in an applet)
That was while I was a University (so was between 1993 - 1998, probably 96 at a guess). That was simultaneously; similar in concept, more impressive by far and much more of an "innovation" at that time...
I may be missing something, but I couldn't see anything "new" there.
Lecturers encourage students to joke about arts students, and humilaite them whenever possible.
What university did you go to?
Sample this!
If the woman in the pictures is representative of the "beautiful" women from the UK mentioned by the poster of the "TV download" article, then I think its proof that the Brits are a bunch of drunks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That server isn't down.
I'm sure if i speak to some of my mates who work in the ecs department at southampton they will confirm that it hasn't died.
Hmm, so in this system, there are documents that are annotated with meta-data... and then, you can run a query on that metadata to find documents matching certain criteria. You can narrow down a query, too. So far so ordinary.
The big problem, though, is that it's hard to be sarcastic enough. Business has already provided various document annotating and indexing systems, and various databases in which to store the results, and various query systems with which to retrieve them / report on them. Now, a bunch of students have done the same thing in miniature and to them it's all terribly much more interesting than those grubby real world systems. Great for them -- problem for me.
I mean, power to them and all, but after the first n Big Honkin' Advances In The Semantic Web, the ordinary Joe like me is left really scraping the barrel for ways to be sarcastic about it. It's all been done -- nothing I can offer that hasn't been modded +5 (70% Funny 30% Troll) in a dozen Semantic Web articles in the past. So I give up, okay? I can't keep up. There, I said it.
I hope you're happy now.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
In other words, someone who knows a lot about the relevant fields of interest has to read or at least examine each document, understand it, figure out its place in the scheme of things, then reach down into his own brain (so to speak) and pull out all the deep linkages so he can annotate the document.
Waddia know, we still need librarians after all!
yes i did try. maybe I have a local issue only affecting this page. but the message saying 'the operation timed out while attempting to connect to mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk' seemed convincing me.
YMMV
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think this was supposed to be funny?
Try reading it in that context and see if you get more out of it.
...it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier.
How difficult is it now? Searching for information online is about as easy as falling down. The only thing I can think of that would make it easier (for me) is if Google could somehow read my mind before I typed something into the little box on their homepage.
Well to be honest I did CS at southampton.
While my course mates and I were pulling all nighters and putting huge amounts of work into our degrees with 12 exams a year, the humanities with english studies students were doing ohh 4 hours a week with 1 exam a year if they were unlucky enough to pick the wrong subject.
You can see why there is a feeling that BA's are easy.
It isn't the lectureres that spread it, it's that the Science and Engineering students notice the Arts students doing practically nothing.
Anyway thats my rant over
Now that's a first. The classical demo requires a Mozilla-type (they say Gecko type) browser for the enhanced javascript capability. IE 6 won't even run it correctly.
I mean, we all know there's only one location in England, right? Er, Britain. Or is it the UK? Mebbe I'm thinking of the Commonwealth.
Anyway, those = London
France = Paris
Germany = Berlin
"Here" = Michigan?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
does it run on Mac OS X ?
I'd call it kSpace
Does this too tie all libraries everywhere together? Certainly it must do so and more to earn the right to be a successor to L-space, as can be gleaned from its name...
If so, one must be careful so you don't end up in the past and find yourself sleeping off the counterwise wine you just drank.
Looks like an almost complete rip-off of Semantic Search, a demo for the early semantic web language SHOE (which heavily influenced DAML).
... looking under Mozart it appears to list pieces in W Flat and J Major .... erm ....having played musical instruments in the past that doesn't seem right :)
t
Meatball Wiki page on GopherProtocol
A copy of the Gopher FAQ
MacOrchard page with TurboGopher VR
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It is a lot of work, but the upshot is improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the technical.
:)
I'd have to agree - that sentence scores very highly on the iron-o-meter
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Silly me, imagined for just a split second that the trans-atlantic link had gotten slashdotted
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just wait until someone decides that aggregation of content and presenting it into a unified format counts as copyright violation.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
And when you reach the end of the database:
Of course, I may be exaggerating.
How we know is more important than what we know.
LMAO Yeah, after this sentence in the middle of that indecipherable block of text, I'm guessing this must be a joke.
Not to mention: What about astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available.
Big boobies
Hmmm.
It appears to me that this is more of a marketing research project than a programming/interface one. Perhaps this is just an attempt to create new buzzology. Semantics and the study thereof usually pertain to linguistics and the management of creating meaning between tokens of language. Whether this be words or symbols, semantics is how we gather meaning from language. I suppose this interface has tokens, but they are rather scattered about and don't derive meaning on their own. The user is responsible for generating the semantics/meaning on their own. This does not make the interface semantic. Searching on Google for classical music alone, I will be forced to derive meaning there as well. It might take longer than using this interface, but specific interfaces to subsets of data is not what Google is about. It bothers me that they somehow want to compare their interface to Google. They would do better to compare to allmusic.com.
This interface does not provide a true linguistic or semantic approach to finding meaning. It provides a hierarchal drill down of data... which is nice, but its not semantic. Semantic search should derive meaning from my intent, or my communication of intent to the interface. Google is actually more semantically oriented. I provide the tokens of language, the interface should parse those tokens and realize my meaning. It can then provide me information based on that intent. This "semantic" interface provides me general meaning first and I have to figure out how that matters to me. Based on the premise of this article, I was hoping the interface would be able to parse language for meaning (better than Google) and then zap out some adequate results. Maybe something like "how did people feel about Bach's music?" and it would tell me all about how he was viewed in popular culture. Instead, I have to first know that Bach was a Classisist and then I can find that information in his larger biography. Not semantic.
If a person has a good understanding of how to create meaning for Google, it can provide better semantic searching than this interface. This is not unlike how people communicate when language is uncommon between them. If we're both speaking the same language, we should understand each other's meaning easily. Deeper meanings can also be derived (sarcasm, emotional cues, etc). When language is a barrier, the relation of meaning breaks down into simpler forms. Many language nuances get lost in the translation. Likewise, search engines are not quite up to speed with things like abstract connections between concepts in language. They understand that language has tokens, but they don't always make meaningful relationships between them.
The site says it needs "standard javascript compatibility." The should consider supporting "standard browser compatibility."
It would be interesting to apply this to information contained in Wikipedia. Does anyone know if someone is working on just such an effort?
Read: http://www.cyber-spy.com/electronics-design/electr o-21158-29917.html
This lame post is stolen from this text...
I'm a developer on the project, and the commentry is appreciated. I'm frankly somewhat surprised at the level of hype the project has generated at this stage of the game. While I find the results that you can get with the current implementation very interesting, there's a lot of work yet to do before it's truly revolutionary. With that said, I'd ask you to consider the possiblities offered by expansions to the original idea. We're working on converting the system as a whole to a web service, allowing any kind of client to access the information in a sensical manner, and linking mspaces together. This, for example, would allow you to hook together information on localality and, say, restaurants. You might be looking for restaurants within a certain area of where you are now. Once you get that information, you could select information on those restaurants in a powerful manner - you could select restaurants that offer vegetarian meals and meals containing low carbohydrates and without gluten, for prices under £10.00. With those results, you may decide to further filter it down by selecting only italian or american style meals. Largely, the power behind the existing concept comes with the ability to construct your own dynamic hierarchies. I posted further down about it while forgetting to log in - with a film database, for example, you might find out about russian actors who acted in american films during the mccarthy era. This is the sort of obscure information that people are unlikely to have written extensively about, so collating the information would be difficult. With the system we have, that sort of information is contained within the relationships for you to discover for yourself. For me, a lot of the potential of this idea is contained in the fact that the google is awesome for discovering information on reasonably common things. For more obscure information, what if nobody has written a page about what you want to know? The information is out there, but has never been collated properly. mSpaces can give you that sort of information, without having to explicitly generate it.
In response to the various snarky comments above, it is indeed innovative to apply a known user interface paradigm to a novel data source.
I, for one, welcome our new 3-pane semantic browser overlords.
The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.
McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."
Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?
*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.
What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe.
I thought they already had a web interface?
This site requires Firefox* for viewing. Click below to have a minimized version of Firefox installed on your computer.
When you leave this site, you will be given to option to keep Firefox on your computer.
If you do not select to keep it, it will be automatically uninstalled.
You will also be given the option to have the full version of Firefox downloaded and installed. A desktop icon will be added, but none of your defauts settings will be changed.
*Other acceptable viewers are Mozilla, Netscape, .....
Why must every software package remain on my computer forever?
This means now I can study female anatomy without running into all those obscene pictures.
mSpace is a LGPLed project that consists of Javascript utilities to access a 3Store RDF repository (3Store is another open source project).
This project looks very useful if you already have RDF data that you would like to publish. There is a PDF paper (that I have only read the first 10 pages of) that looks good. Anyway, I might use this on a demo that I am (slowly) working on.
So if you browse to "Classical" and click on Handel, it tells you it has no information. If you browse to "Modern" and click on Strauss, it brings up a page on Handel.
Considering these were the first two I clicked on, I'm not impressed.
Anybody know how to contact them to report an error?
Although this project isn't strictly "wrapped around" (pardon the pun) Berners-Lee's semantic web, but rather an external semantic "space" defined by a conceptual foundation and then refined by users in the inteface, it still fails to address to metatag/metdata problem, namely:
1) The metadata sink. Creating an "mSpace" around classical composers is one thing. Doing the same on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" is another. As you broaden the concept, you have to depend on a more-refined framework of contextual and categorical distinctions. Eventually, you may be creating more metadata than data.
2) The metadata reflection problem. Metadata, in that it is not the data itself, cannot possibly reflect every notion, category of thought or context -- many of those things depend on the user's own interaction with the data (e.g. what you find "funny" I may find "dumb."). And, as often mentioned, metadata may in fact be missing, ouright misleading or incomplete.
IMHO, though metadata projects such as these are intriguing, the true "holy grail" of classifying data is understanding context. Thus, why worry about metadata when you have the data write there in front of you? Even a statistical anaysis of word/phrase frequency over say, 100 pages returned by Google on "quantum mechanics and philosophy" can yield concepts and connections without any metadata creation/foundation at all (i.e. the user analyzing the key words/phrases can make those connections on his/her own).
Clearly I'm biased, as I work on software for OS X that does just this, but still, I honestly believe that creating more data, just to describe what is an increasingly massive corpus (the web), is the wrong solution to the "understanding" problem.
So I click on Baroque, click on J.S.Bach, and...
Wait. There isn't any, oh well, I guess they have a really small playlist. Trundling on, let's open Classical...
First entry is Bach.
And not C.P.E.Bach, either. J.S.Bach.
I guess this is an attempt to illustrate "I may not know much about Classical Music, but I Know what I like when I hear it."
Right?
Are you supposed to be able to hear clips of the music? On my Mac running Firefox, I cannot. Thanks, Alex
San Francisco Photographers
Ugh that is worse than IE web developers forcing add-on modules just to view one web page.
On the same note I do agree with the last statement. I hate needing ActiveX or flash just to view one stupid page then being bombarded with popup ads that cover the article I'm trying to read.
Yeah I use firefox but many computers I work on (work, customers, Mom, etc) do not.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
This would also improve machine translation of human languages quite a lot.
There was an effort at Cambridge University in the 1960s (called the CLRU, Cambridge Language Research Unit) to do exactly this.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Displaying information in a iTunes-like fashion is the easy part. OK, so they have a nice demo for a few domains, but there have been lots of those kinds of semantic browsers before, for all sorts of domains. The hard part is actually getting the consistent semantic markup for all that information out there and to come up with browsing paradigms that work more generally, instead of having to hand-code something for each domain.
Basically, all these people have done is done a nice demo using modern DHTML, but they have not done any of the hard work.
What i like to see is an interface to semantic web like this : http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root. html
it has to be in authoring.
Or more precisely, not having to do so much authoring to get more information delivery bang for the buck.
The Itunes example is a good one. You don't need something like Itunes or even a playlist manager to play, or even organize your music. You could write a web page with links to all your media encoded as file URLs. In fact, you could do all kinds of things with the web page idea that you couldn't do with ITunes; except you never woudl because it isn't worth the trouble just to be able to find your MP3s and play them.
Alternatively, you could use your operating systems's "find files" function to find "*.mp3", and sort through the resulting file/directory names.
ITunes is less trouble to maintain than the web page idea, and more convenient than using search and examining the MP3 tags of the rsults. It fills a useful role in the gap between these approaches. The designers of ITunes allow you to do a bit of each approach, creating playlists (the web page approach), or searching your MP3 collection (the find file approach), but it is also smart about understanding the metadata attached to the MP3s.
I havent' read the article too closely, but my impression is that what they are talking about could be seen as an evolutionary development of the idea of a content management framework, that would make use of standardized metadata. Like any framework, it doesn't do all the work for you. It just would take the tedious task or organizing all that data and replaces it with the tedious (but hopefully shorter) task of figuring out how to get it all to work in the framework.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well this isn't cutting edge. Its using meta data to plop data into a hierarchy, with a decent little interface. It goes nowhere in overcoming the inherent problems of the semantic web-a-likes, problems that have been raised ad-infinitum in and out of the academic world - its static reliance on fixed ontologies, intractable Labour-intensivity, brittleness - its a informational dead-end full propogated by ex-1970's AI production system-ists and other fine researchers who unfortunately have too much vested interest to let go :(
Course, having said that...
"*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas and quality computer science. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too."
This is a great point. Despite my rant...Is it a problem? Course not. This is still research, and good research at that (if unspectacular). If it had been hyped less people would view it as a nice new slant. But absurd marketing overhype is only going to make its creators, who deserve credit for a nice bit of work, feel a bit silly.
> Imagine PR on drugs.
I don't have to imagine...
if you have an n dimensional space - which music is - how do you represent it so that meaning can be gained from it?
take a projection through an n-d space, flatten it, temporary hierarchies come forth.
that's what's happening with the current view. change the slice/projection by changind that attributes/dimensions selected. new hierarchies, new relationships. what do you think?
and actually in this case we're not using an ontology - tho having one would allow for extra inference. we also believe with minsky in "scruffy works' as opposed to brittleness.
i don't know that we're trying to edge cut so much as explore other ways of exploring information by exposing relationships. it's really about improving access. and making that generally easier to expose in the ui. maybe it doesn't have to bleed or cut just to let folks have an improvement.
for instance, folks we ran trials with went from an experience of "no access" to classical music to one of feeling "great access" to a domain previously experienced as "off limits"
that's a quantum leap for the person wanting the information, don't you think?
as for "absurd marketing hype" thank you for your contribution to it!
Did anybody else read that as "University Launches Symantec Web Interface"?
ok, ok, ok back to my hole.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Tim Berners-Lee is all about making the web smarter and this mspace and other projects like SIMILE are changing the way we leverage data in smarter ways keep up the good work.
SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the W3C, HP, MIT Libraries, and MIT CSAIL. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.
SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.
John Anthony Hartman
Why doesn't it work on Opera?
While the idea is neat and clearly it is possible to put their idea into practice as shown by the demo, this project really does not have all that much to do with the semantic web. Unless the article is very misleading, it seems like the project uses RDF as a basis for finding and creating these slices. But partitioning data isn't what will make the semantic web powerful. We need computers themselves to understand the relationships between different sources of information on the semantic web. This will enable us to query/use different services in conjunction with one another whereas this project seems to gather said data and slice it up into ways for different people to interact with it. The former allows for greater expressivity and power while the latter (this project) seems to be more of a database project for building views with tagged data that is collected. Information integration is a solved problem in computer science and I hope that people don't see that as what the semantic web is about.
zzStructures?
Sounds like something I studied a lot in math class. Pity my prof didn't believe me...
"But sir, I think better with my eyes closed!"
Chandler:V ision.htm
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_
Haystack:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/
Erik Dalén
semantic web interface? What does being jewish have to do with anything
What about an semantic interface based on Websom http://websom.hut.fi/websom/milliondemo/html/root. html interface? Just an idea
I'm surprised that they haven't collaborated with the MusicBrainz project. That seems to be one problem with these Semantic Web projects, they don't see to have awarness of what other people have already done. MusicBrainz is collection a lot of information on artists, records, composers, etc. and they're even going to have more classical-oriented support soon.
Paid content.
The demo, tellingly, is a sparse winter tree with no leaves. None of the classical pieces I clicked on led anywhere. Do you think this will be any different when released into the wild?
Classical music, you might think, would be a good example of where it really would work because copyright expired for these long before the corrupt american media associations bought their oppressive laws. However copyright still inheres in individual performances and recordings, so no joy there.
I can see how it would work for subject areas where the base material is free, like open source documentation. But any sort of copyrighted paid-for media is a poor example unless people start surfing the web expecting to buy before they try.
This is a very pretty demo and I am looking forward to digesting the linked papers. At first glance it seems not so interesting since the functionality provided by the demo would seem to be reproduceable with a simple sql engine.
What I still am not so sure about (and is why I want to read the articles and the code I downloaded - THANKS!) is the following perceptions I had (possibly erroneous) on first glance:
- It is not clear how an semantic web ontology is being used, presumably there is rdf with some rules about e.g. what period is baroque and then some other semantic rules are used as a guide on how to organize the interface (or I suppose you would say along which dimensions to slice the whole n-dimensional mishmash and in what order).
- Having been quite interested in faceted metadata search/navigation engines, I pounce upon seeming drawback of this presentation, in that it forces a hierarchy and browsing direction on a user, whereas it is difficult to discover information laterally starting from a leaf node (basically it feels like you are viewing yahoo a few levels in advance). And also that you don't know how many items are available in a set until you click, though I suppose the "mouse hover and wait" function is supposed to solve that, but it doesn't.
- wrecked keyboard-based advancement of slashdot thread using space bar after viewing in firefox, but could just be some memory flakiness on my machine I suppose.
- why not use perl and a js-based dhtml module instead of php? (since I like perl and also because it would be nice to have programmatic access to your semantically informed rdf browser, maybe)
- relationship of this philosophically and scientifically to faceted metadata browsers such as flamenco (to become OSS we are told) and the work of companies like Endeca, Siderean, etc.
- Why is the user not told about the semantic rules being used? Wouldn't that help inform exploration of a subject?
Otherwise it is an interesting project and I wish you luck.
Matt Rosin
One thing I do not get about the semantic web: it seems to be based on the idea of meta-data and then expands on this into how this data can be searched, indexed accessed etc.
But I have not read anywhere how this meta-data will be verified: HTML already provides meta-data tags, but they are useless because that were abused in the past. (Googles success is partly based on the fact that they ignored the meta-data and tryed to get the real document content.)
So how will the semantic web be any better ?