Slashdot Mirror
C|Net Integrates Ontology Viewer Into News Site
ikewillis writes "The new beta version of news.com now features an integrated ontology viewer developed in collaboration with LivePlasma who appears to have built a large ontology for music and movies. While they don't appear to provide direct access to the ontological data using semantic web formats like OWL and RDF, it's the first time I've ever seen web ontologies used on such a high profile site. How long until we can expect web ontology viewers (and semantic web integration) for sites like Wikipedia?"
That do want it or not, the semantic web is coming!
I have never found that view on the data very usedul. It's a solution in search of a problem to my mind.
Thalasar
That's nice. I'm still boycotting so-called "news".com.com.com after the uncalled-for article in which they posted personal information about Google's co-founders.
Furthermore, "news".com.com.com posts favorable "reviews" of its advertisers and slights those who do not purchase enormous ads on its web site. I'll stick with Objective Neutral news, thank you very much.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
I've noticed, for example, that the "Macintosh" (the computer) section of Google News often has non-Macintosh-related stories about sports, crimes, political events, etc. just because a person named "Macintosh" was named in the story. Smarter semantic analysis of news stories would help better categorize articles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
For the uninformed, here is some valuable information about ontology.
To get an actual working version of this thing, you have to go to the beta news site and then click on any of the story headlines.
Wikipedia's plans concerning the SW can be found here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki.
From the site:
"The WikiProject "Semantic MediaWiki" provides a common platform for discussing extensions of the MediaWiki software that allow for simple, machine-based processing of Wiki-content. This usually requires some form of "semantic annotation," but the special Wiki environment and the multitude of envisaged applications impose a number of additional requirements."
Ever since Java 1.0 was released with one of those stretchy "network graph" applets, I've been waiting to see them used as the navigational paradigm for webpages. Pages force us to look at a connected "graph" of linked objects sequentially, hiding the overall relationship among objects. It's been 10 years - maybe now we'll finally get this stuff to work.
--
make install -not war
I am disappointed with the lack of support in MediaWiki for ontologies and controlled vocabularies. I have been playing around with wikis for annotating outdoor activities my site at outdoordb.org and I am finding that it would be great to have tighter integration of controlled vocabularies. For example, if a hike occurs in Mt. Rainier National Park, I have to make sure that it is always annotated as the same string, instead of annotating with a key that always refers to Mt. Rainier NP. Users who annotate using different strings (such as 'Mount Rainier NP') either need to be fixed or they remain semantically disjointed. The cool thing about wikis is that these ontologies could grow with the knowledgebase, and allow users to select existing terms as they are needed. They could even be extracted and used elsewhere. If the edit page had an 'insert term' button, it could take care of the backend on its own, maybe using categories as an ontology.
And now I'm sitting here with a room full of sticky webcams!
I guess I just came at this from the wrong angle.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
..I came, I saw, I dragged stuff around for a second and then introduced the string "*plasma*swf" to Mr. Adblock.
Jay M. Tenenbaum gave a talk at AAAI-05 on the Semantic Web, asking people working in Artificial Intelligence to take a more active interest in its development. In his view, the idea is to provide systems with the type of data that would be exceptionally good for artificially intelligent systems to work with, but that without the support of the AI community, we would never arrive at that.
Maybe the poster was looking for something like that.
I think the quality of that "ontology" speaks for itself.
People have been trying to draw these little graphs for years, and I have yet to see one that actually is more useful than a simple textual presentation.
What would that look like? Something like this:
Related Topics:
- Music Players
- Cell Phones
- Gadgets
Related Stories:
- Motorola introduces the Uberfrob [in Motorola]
- Apple and Motorola team up [in Apple, Motorola]
- Microsoft's new media player has Really Secure DRM now [in Microsoft]
If it gets more complex than that, you can use multiple levels of indentation to group things (but don't you go out and patent that now!).
from the w3 OWL page
"...a web ontology language. An ontology formally defines a common set of terms that are used to describe and represent a domain. Ontologies can be used by automated tools to power advanced services such as more accurate web search, intelligent software agents and knowledge management."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Open Directory Project
I would think the significant volunteer work done towards creating a freely-usable (with attribution) ontology of the web would be useful for a project such as this, even if the actual *content* wasn't.
The same for use in WikiPedia, actually... hmm.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/#onto-def
I thought the exact same thing.
What is it with marketing droids that try to co-opt existing words and create thier own definitions completly out of context with the original definition??
The viewer brings up at the bottom:
The Website www.slashdot.org does exist.
Wordnet is a free semantic database with ~150,000 words and their semantic relations, and libs for several programming languages. I have played with it a lot over the years and it's an amazing database. (There are also versions being created for other languages than English.)
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://d48.yousendit.com/E/0TAPOMWU3KCTE22Y3NSCXFK MRI/newsplasma6.txt
... that lead in is hard to read if you only know the original, useful definition of ontology, as opposed to the modern buzzword-tastic definition.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
What a totally useless feature.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
Stanford just got it's 2nd NIH super-center for biomedical comptuing -- this one on Ontologies
e r/computation.html
see
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/septemb
soon ontologies will be to computing what politics is to governemnt
I don't think you know how it is used in CompSci...
From dictionary.com:
2. (From philosophy) An explicit
formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts
and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of
interest and the relationships that hold among them
Feel free to check out citeseer for more ontology information.
The CNet "ontology" is more of a topic graph though.
Why do they insist on using news.com.com
Do they think that com.com is cool? Personally I think it makes them look very stupid, I'm curious what others think?
I wrote them an email me asking them why they do it, I doubt I'll get a response though.
Back to the viewer though, it looks very fancy and all but how much practical application does it have? How many people care a story has a thin link to another story because they both were sniffed at by Yahoo last week?
Not to knock it though, it seems to work well. I think it's got more of a "wow" factor than a real use. Looks nice though!
Well, that's one meaning. There are others.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
It gave me visions of a cross between goatse and JAMA.
This reminds me of Public Information Research, Inc.'s namebase.org java diagrams.
Linus Torvalds
Click the java diagram link from the top of the static gif diagram.
This has been around since 2000?
Also I think in...2002, Touchgraph came out with this google browser, and they have a wiki browser
sourceforge project page - touchgraph
It's nice to see SW tech getting more mainstream exposure... Unfortunately, there's still some big issues in user interface design when it comes to working with SW data. If you seriously attempt navigating using a dynamic and unpredictable graph, it quickly becomes a UI nightmare for anything beyond superficial applications.
:-D
I'm part of a team working towards making the 'solution in search of a problem' useful for average users. We have a proof-of-concept available at our site: http://www.semantikos.org/
Comments and flames welcome...
Oh, and be sure and check out the big kids: Haystack, SIMILE's Piggybank, etc.
Solution seeks Problem - for meaningful relationship.
But, what if we use the same technologies that allow for p2p annotation of sites (like Greasemonkey, de.licio.us), to, with few clicks, vote on the relation of the important ideas in a site? You'd have to have a credibility/karma/trust system, as some of the most important relations you'd want to search on are commercial/noncommercial, advertisement/review, question/answer. And these would definitely be targets for spammers, advertisers, pranksters, and other habitual defectors.
Most people would not bother definining the relationships, but you'd only need a fraction of a percent to do the initial reviews. People who are not averse to cooperation, for example the people who work on OSS or wikis, will see that if they have sunk 15 minutes of searching into finding a page, doing a minute or two of markup/commentary can save thousands of others that much time. A larger group will be willing to vote on the accuracy of the links in two situations: they find the links very useful, or very misleading. The more misleading karma you've built up, the less your vote is worth, which should take care of spammers (but still leaves political/religious debates wide open for mismoderation).
And then, of course, Google ties it together by using these tags to enable semantic searches:
"I want English or German language ANSWERS to the question, how do I get the Marvell SATA driver working under RHEL 3.0, written between 2004 and 2005".
The semantic search should know that RHEL 3.0 is aka "Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0", and "Marvell SATA" could be mv_sata or aar81xx.
The poster nor the moderator bother to actually define what "ontology": is. So I looked it up in the dictionary. "The branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being." Sounds like the media is finally starting to take a good, close look at themselves. And their navels.
Come on, folks. Not everybody knows what 'ontology' is (in the context of the web) nor should they. I've been a computer professional for 20 years and I didn't know. I really grow tired of the whole 'if you don't know then you don't belong here' mentality. Let it go, children. Time to grow up and let others into the clubhouse.
I thought it was an ad for something and I blocked it. Oh well. All the squares were overlapping and hard to read.
I am so lazy, that I'm not even willing to google the word ontology, but not so lazy to bitch about what a stupid headline that was. At least it's not a dupe, yet.
Beyond the question of whether this beats some bullet lists, C/Net's version sucks. The flash for the $100 laptop is big enough to fill most of a smaller screen. And, it has exactly these pieces of information ...
* 3 related stories
* 5 related topics
* 1 related company
Half of those links are pretty much irrelevant. The worst one is "Piracy". I'm not sure if that links is because theft of these things is a major issue (I doubt it since the goal is to give them to every school kid) or because it will somehow encourage software piracy (the things don't have enough memory to install most commercial software) or
To top the goofiness off, the default view is large print and there's no way to zoom farther out or move the view up or down so the other topics/stories/companies/whatevers come into view. It must've taken some work to turn off those flash features. One wonders why?
Of course, I can always click the full screen button. Ohhh look! To look at the article and the ontology widget I need a 20in LCD. But, if I've got that 20" LCD, I can see little colored balloons with useful information like "Piracy" and "Microsoft"
Sheesh.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Excellent, I have been lacking an easy to access directory of birds. Owls, eagles, falcons, finches.. these are all things I am now able to view while browsing a technology news website.
Thank you, Science Of The Intercyberwebsupernet.
In the dot com days, they'd have been trillionaires for doing something like this.
Either way, I don't think I like it. "Ontology" is not the study of things, it's the study of "being". Ask me about the "ontology for iPods" and I won't tell you about Apple and the features of the iPod. If I bother to take you seriously, expect a lengthy metaphysical discussion about material and form, use and knowledge, and probably god (at some point) will be raised as a real issue. Then you'll get some little something about how all that relates to iPods.
Of course, I'm probably way too late for this discussion, as well as failing to be a member of the correct club. But couldn't they have found a word that actually means what they want it to mean?
Would define words that 99% of the universe has never heard of. I think most people reading the article had no idea what "ontology" means, including the submitter, until he read CNET's article on it.
Gee.. the amount of dupes it would find :|
/. is good for you.
This is odd timing since I just blogged on Big Picture...
Essentially my points are that there are cooler graph packages out there. The other issue being that it's not really a user-focused product. I just don't see many people using this.
The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master ontology) and further for each and every web page to markup parts of the page (or the entire page) by indicating parts of the ontology which refer to that piece of text. Then a search engine will come along and use the semantic information encoded in OWL (or some other RDF variant) to know what the page is able and to provide better search results.
The problem is that this process puts far far far too much responsiblity on the web page author. First, they must be aware of this obsecure project. Second, they must understand ontologies and markup their pages honestly. Third, they must maintain this knowledge against shifting ontologies, and the drift of human language both geographically and over time.
Ignoring for a second that people tend to spam search engines in the ever increasing competition for hits. Most people don't have the time, expertese or patience to add this information to the page. It will just be used to fool the search bot just like the meta tags that most search engines currently ignore.
There are good WSD (word sense disabiguation) technologies currently being developed that can figure out from context clues which meaning for a specific word is intended by the author. And these tools are generally built around wordnet which is the ontology that most AI researchers use (and it isn't in RDF, OIL, OWL or any of the other stuff from the W3C). AI researchers know the semantic web won't work because of the reasons outlined above and a few more I can't think of right now. Search engines are pretty good and will only be getting better with time. Quit pimping the semantic web. It only makes you look ignorate in the eyes of the AI community.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
It's not about visual representation, it's about finding the right things, even when things are called differently.
Perhaps it will help in translating issues as well. Since it is not about syntax, which you may or may not 'speak', it's about semantics, which we all understand.
Still I'm a bit pessemistic in how far this will work eventually, the ontologies written are as specific as the designers of them want them to be. Which leaves a big gap between the different ontologies, even on the same subject.
When they can be automatically merged, than it will work as it's suppost to work. But we're not nearly there yet.
... and that is a good thing.
See: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.
Metadata is just data with a non-standard interface. If you get rid of the non-standard interface you will live much happier.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
While Liveplasma is certainly cool, they didn't build their own Ontology source . . . They used Amazon's Web Services. AWS blogged about it a while ago
There are many and varied definitions, including yours BTW, which the Troll modders apparently didn't bother checking.
Google define:Ontology
The definitions vary so much that ontology is in danger of losing its traditional meanings to become a buzzword that doesn't actually mean anything other than "we are going to use this new jargon word for our patents now that we have hired an internet founder or some other famous figure who has agreed to back us up on our use of the term despite the conceptual existence of alternatives." If your post isn't perfectly informative, at least it can be insightful.
Reinvention of the lexicon is a possible backdoor into the patent system for pre-existing technologies, or technologies that are similar to pre-existing functions for the same thing. They are basically renamed so as to appear like something new, and if it is official-sounding enough (ontology sounds like a pretty serious term...), they may be able to pass under the patent office's radar. If the patent office doesn't watch for this exploit, we will end up with a bunch of overlapping cruft. (Not that that isn't already the case.)
That thing is useless. I bet it will be off of their site in under a month.
I remember reading that article some time ago, and loving it. Sometimes academic eggheads get it right (using CSS to separate form from content), and sometimes they labor for years on an idea that you can show to be worthless in a single page (like the Semantic Web). And here I just spent twenty minutes googling for it because I couldn't remember the author's name, I finally found it so that I could show it to the world... and you already found it. Good stuff, eh?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The semantic web is impractical for a variety of reasons, most importantly it requires a bunch of people to know a new protocol. Much more practical is to leverage the similarity in the structure of websites like Wikipedia to automatically generate the semantic tags. As an example, it's really easy to scrap off the birthdays of people from the vast majority of wikipedia articles about people.
YouSendIt.com has problems scaling up. You want to use things like Rapidshare.de or similar services, so that thousands and thousands can download the item.
Err... what the crap is it, though?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Oh, and be sure and check out the big kids: Haystack, SIMILE's Piggybank, etc."
Protege
SWOOP
PhotoStuff
Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited
" Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology (IT) is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself."
In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek , genitive : being (part. of : to be) and -: writing about, study of) is the most fundamental branch of metaphysics. It studies being or existence as well as the basic categories thereof--trying to find out what entities and what types of entities exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
If I was searching for a word that meant "a common set of terms used to describe a domain", I personally would have used the word "lingo". I guess it's just not as cool as overloading "ontology".
WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
- ALL the PDFs and Adobe documents that you use have RDF embedded in them - ALL social networking sites data is marked up using the FOAF ontologySW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..
Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..
- There is BioPAX for pathway data- Gene Ontology is now ported into RDFS/OWL
Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...
AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work
I refuse to use it until they Hextegrate it into their Epistemic PodCast(tm) Mindshare meta-search concept feature set.
Did anyone else feel like this after reading that article summary?
<family guy> Dennis Miller: I don't wanna go on a rant here but America's foreign policy makes about as much sense as Beowolf having sex with Robert Fulton at the first Battle of Antetum. I mean when a neo-conservative defenstrates it's like Raskalnakov filibuster dioxymonohydrostinate. Peter: What the hell does rant mean? </family guy>Yay! Ornothology!
Oh wait... ontology.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
How about a frickin' wildcard search?
"It only makes you look ignorate in the eyes of the AI community."
Considering the history of AI's previous failures. I don't think they have the room to be casting any stones.
Long live aizing of web!!!
Creativity uninhibited www.kreeti.com
The Semantic Web does not expect everyone to agree on an ontological framework, just as OO programming does not require everyone to use everyone else's classes. When you write an little java ontology (also known as a class library), you put your 'ontology' in a special name space which allows mixing and matching. To get your library widely adopted you need to do a lot more than write it. You need:
In Java one well known and respected channel for this to happen is the Java Community Process. People can use other channels of course, and often do. But from time to time everyone agrees that there is no need to keep re-inventing a framework and they then decide to go to some standards body to agree on some common mapping, to help interoperability. The interoperability in Java was there all along of course. But what was needed is a Convention to use a certain vocabulary.
Exactly the same will be true in the Semantic Web. The best ontologies will survive. Processes will be put in place to help foster good ones.
Also I think you should not think that the only use of ontologies is to annotate web pages. The semantic web is here to help you speak about resources in general, not just web resources. You may have more luck thinking about the Semantic Web in terms of a way of doing what SQL currently does [4] (see SPARQL) but in a much much more scalable way.
Henry Story
[1] Java Annotations and the Semantic Web
[2] UML, MOF, MDA, OWL: how they all fit together
[3] Would a little DOAP help?
[4] SPARQL to ignite web 2.0
been there , done that.
its called 'cataloging'
hopefully library science and these folks can learn a few tricks from each other