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."

Comments

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[miaDWZ]

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.

This whole "semantic web" thing...

[PornMaster]

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?

Re:This whole "semantic web" thing...

[SnapShot]

Bravo. The term "semantic web" gets thrown around a lot. I think there is a hidden desire among a lot of people that if they just add enough markup data then suddenly and magically the web will become self-aware and AI will be born.

In a more functional sense, the pieces are slowly being put into place, but as long as there are a huge number of people with varying mental processes "marking up" the data, the whole thing won't be any more than a labor-intensive way of making new web pages. Where I believe it will work is where you have a trusted source of data that is in a known heirarchical format that can be preprocessed into a set interdependent links. Endeca (sp?) does a good job of this for individual commerce sites (I think CompUSA's search is powered by Endeca). iTunes (or any other music database) and IMDB are other good examples of data sources that could be wrapped with semantic meaning. Perhaps these trusted sources will eventually merge so that a the "seven degrees of Kevin Bacon" could expand to cover the world of music (how many degrees of separation between Kevin and Bach?).

"provided the basic information is available"

[mwood]

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!

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[oneandoneis2]

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.