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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'm sorry to say this, but that isn't a good thing.
If a webmaster starts to shift his focus from IE to FireFox/Mozilla, he is just being as bad as all the other webmasters who give preference to IE users.
Yes, Firefox is all open source and everything, I agree, it should supported. But that does not mean webmasters should just drop development for other web browsers.
We should be encouraging webmasters to make their websites work in all browsers, not one specific.
Just working in Firefox is no better then just working in IE.
"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?
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How about just writing to standards? And if IE chokes on the standards, too damn bad. Maybe they'll get it right with version 7.
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!
If a webmaster starts to shift his focus from IE to FireFox/Mozilla, he is just being as bad as all the other webmasters who give preference to IE users.
Not necessarily - Firefox, like most other FOSS browsers, is standards-compliant, IE isn't. This is the biggest obstacle to having a website that can be viewed by any browser.
So if this is down to a website complying with the correctstandards, the problem is squarely with IE, and may convince M$ to do it everybody else's way, instead of insisting that everybody else does it the M$ way. . .
So long as the choice is "Should we make our site standards-compliant or IE-compatible?" there can never be a truly universal website.
So.. it has come to this
Just wait until someone decides that aggregation of content and presenting it into a unified format counts as copyright violation.
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Actually, computer science researchers, such as those at the University of Southampton who developed this, don't have a particular requirement (moral or actual) to develop "for all platforms". They are interested in research - showing something can be done, and publishing details on it when they have shown it can be done, not waiting til they have also ported it to all proprietary platforms.
This isn't a product; it's a research demo.
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.
I'd applaud if it has been done: if there's a site or space i can go to right now that will let me easily explore information spaces, see interconnections, associations, that looks to do that not just with a lonely database but with a www of data, that would be awesome.
where is it?
thanks