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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?"
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.
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."
..I came, I saw, I dragged stuff around for a second and then introduced the string "*plasma*swf" to Mr. Adblock.
Maybe the poster was looking for something like that.
It seems to me that the entire point of the wiki is to do away controlled vocabularies. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html is a good read about these kind of things - he doesn't talk about wikis in particular, but the same things apply.
See you, space cowboy...
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."
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/
What a totally useless feature.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
It's a bad application of the word based on ambiguation and confusion. The theoretical research that precedes RDF and semantic databases such as Wordnet and CYC is actually much like ontology in the traditional sense. That is, it consists in deciding what sorts of entities qualifies (are "real") and on what grounds, and so on. So the result of such a project was called "an ontology." But since the word is cool-sounding and using it suggests that you Know Stuff(tm), it was inevitable that any relational database with random stuff would eventually be called an ontology.
For instance, as useful as Google is, it's a pain to try to perform queries for things such as "a disease that begins with the letter 'c' and involves a body's inability to produce energy from flour-based foods".
I just typed in "disease digest flour" (minus the quotes) into Google, and the third match was Celiac Disease, which I'm assuming is the correct answer. It didn't seem like much of a pain in the ass to me -- it took less than 15 seconds, including the time to think up the search terms. I don't see where an "ontology" buys you anything here. It just makes it 10x harder to write up a document on the backend.
I've seen this argument before; that the semantic web and ontologies somehow make searches easier, but I've never seen anyone actually give an example that wasn't easily disproven. It's always been arguments like yours: a little hand-waving and the claim that "this is hard using search engines, but easy using the semantic web", and then wording a query in a way that is deliberately obtuse ("inability to produce energy") so as to confuse a search engine.
So... I'm calling you on this. I've illustrated that using the search engine isn't really as hard as you're making it out to be here. Care to try again?