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."
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.
...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?
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.
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!
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.
Fair comment - we ARE a bunch of pissheads. (So would you be if you had to put up with British women).
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.
Just wait until someone decides that aggregation of content and presenting it into a unified format counts as copyright violation.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
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'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.
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.
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.
Actually you're not the only one. We are too (the mspace team that is). For a research project, our first goal has been to work with standards compliant browsers. Our second goal, pending cycles, will be to get UIs that work on more browsers. Many folks interested in our approach have an installed base of IE users so we need to support those communities. Sorry that you couldn't use your usual browser yet. Thanks for visiting the project, though.
As opposed to easy, it's also effective. so why aren't more sites doing this? It's like the mac osx watson tool (RIP).
As for the "hard part", you don't hand code the browser for each domain. The framework lets you through any semantic model at it you want. if you have an ontology so much the better. it is a general browser. the demo is just, well, a demo.
if you look at the report or the papers at the main site, http://mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk, you'll see where that "hard part" is happeneing, in terms of coding, rdf and related.
thanks for taking the time to look at the project.
Part of the project is to allow wiki-like connections to the info views for publishing related content. Or using talkback like pings to talk with brokers/aggregators so that mspaces can be generated dynamically, and fed dynamically based on available rdf.
This is very much a start - a look at what might be/come something (more) useful, not as the done deal
That said, we hope that for the interim, by having a dump out to google on a topic you've already identified of interest that that will let you explore more readily or associatively.
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!
Chandler:V ision.htm
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_
Haystack:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/
Erik Dalén