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'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.
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?).
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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.