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?"

Comments

Hopefully Never

[Thanatopsis]

I have never found that view on the data very usedul. It's a solution in search of a problem to my mind.

Re:Hopefully Never

[Inspector Lopez]

It's a solution in search of a problem to my mind.
Perhaps. The same could be said (by most people) of the WWW when it first appeared. I remember thinking that the GUI (i.e. Mosaic) was sort of nice, and the html was sort of interesting, but it wasn't clear to me that it was anything more than a friendly user interface to FTP and Gopher. Turns out, I was wrong. So perhaps these "ontology"/"semantic web" things are a bit clunky now, but that's okay. They are addressing a real issue with the Web. Since they are so new, it would be unreasonable to expect the early implementers to hit upon the optimal UI right off the bat.

Re:Hopefully Never

[Tyler Eaves]

Yes, in a world in which 95% of users can't grasp simple boolean modifiers, such a scheme would surely be a success!

Re:Hopefully Never

[Anonymous Coward]

"Genesis requirement"? *chuckle* What does that express that the simple word 'prerequisite' couldn't give you? Not that I know how anyone else feels about it, but I deliberately avoid technologies like this that attract tossers in such numbers. Every time I read something about the semantic web, it's all neologisms and awkward, pretentious phrasings. Too reminiscent of dotbomb hype and snake oil salesmen in general.

I don't think I'm alone in this either. Thing is, no one cares how smart you are if they are reading about something else entirely, and if you're trying to tell us about some technology or idea you think we could profit by knowing about, communicate in clear English and you will find a more receptive audience. You might say clarity and lack of pretension are a communication requirement. ;p

Sorry to pick on you in particular, maybe you've just written too many grant applications or something.

Re:Hopefully Never

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Score:5, Insightful" ...but I've noticed a tendency of late for people to post: "In a world where people are too stupid to use computers anyway, what good is...(insert technology here)." Is it insightful? Tuning in TV signals used to be difficult. Using a telephone used to be difficult. As stupid as people are, they aren't as stupid as we so often portray them.

Technology makes new things possible.

Interfaces get better.

People adapt.

speaks for itself

[idlake]

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!).

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It would be nice if article submitters

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:.com.com

[blincoln]

Why do they insist on using news.com.com

Probably so they can share cookies between all of the sites they own, since they're all tied to com.com.

No its not

[sfcat]

I am tired of people touting the Semantic Web. It isn't a good idea just because it came out of the W3C. I'll explain...

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.

Re:No its not

[Narphorium]

The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master ontology)..

The Semantic Web does not expect everyone to agree on one ontological framework. At the core of the Semantic Web Architecture is the concept of XML namespaces which allow you to differentiate overlapping ontologies. In other words, the Semantic Web is designed to take into account different views of the same domains and provides mechanisms to map between these different views.

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.

The problem of effeciently creating, managing and maintaining semantic metadata is a valid concern but I believe it is something that can eventually be solved. There are already many examples of technology which can automatically extract metadata from webpages, mp3s and other forms of media. Even ontology creation can be automated to some degree.

I think your biggest misconception is that you see the Semantic Web as something which is suppose to replace the existing web with some kind of magical AI. The Semantic Web is merely suppose to opperate in parallel to the existing web structure much the same way RSS feeds or bittorrents do. Some site might contain metadata, others won't. Some ontologies will overlap, some domains won't be covered by any ontology. The point is not to store all human knowledge in one large, machine-readable file, it's to create a set of tools which researchers can use to express _some_ of the complex relationships between concepts within a specific domain.

Quit pimping the semantic web. It only makes you look ignorate in the eyes of the AI community.

While I agree that the Semantic Web has been 'pimped' a little more than it should have I know that semantic reasoning and knowledge-based systems are far from being viewed as "ignorate" concepts in the eyes of the AI community.

Re:No its not (its already here)

[copdk4]

The semantic web expects everyone to agree on one ontological framework (one master 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'.
SW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..

- 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 ontology

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