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

[ccady]

There are many area where an ontological search (not necessarily graphical like C|Net) is very useful. For example. I started writing a search engine for medical texts which used a medical ontology underneath. It made it so you could search for "heart attack" and get back results about "myocardial infarction" which never mentioned the term "heart attack."

An ontology can make your search much better.

Re:Hopefully Never

[null etc.]

When evaluating this technology's potential, one must take care to separate criticism of its view from the inherent data representation underneath.

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". With an ontology-based data source, one simply needs to write an interface that allows the user to construct such queries using a formal grammar:

x.term.beginsWith ('c')
x.classification ('medical disease')
x.attributes.symptoms.searchTerms ('flour produce energy')

etc. that's just one possible example, but semantic knowledge is infinitely more powerful than grammatical knowledge, and ontology is the genesis requirement of semantic webs.

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

[r55man]

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?

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.

Google news needs this

[G4from128k]

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.

Ontology

[Sarcastic Assassin]

For the uninformed, here is some valuable information about ontology.

functional

[icepick72]

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.

Re:functional

[advocate_one]

It needs Flash... without it, there's no fancy schmancy picture...

Re:functional

[icepick72]

... and did anybody notice after you visit the beta version of site, you are automatically pushed back to it whenever you try to go to the regular news.com? (try it with these links -- weird) Looks like some cookie magic. Looks like they want their readership to fall over to the new site. Considering this is /. it's more like a mass exodus to the beta version.

Wikipedia -- semantic plans

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

perhaps i missunderstand wikipedia ...

[smoondog]

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.

Re:perhaps i missunderstand wikipedia ...

[rmull]

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.

Those bastards stole my idea!

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

I've been working for months on my colostomy viewer website! They stole my idea and just changed a couple of letters! Once again it's the big guy beating up the little guy!

And now I'm sitting here with a room full of sticky webcams!

I guess I just came at this from the wrong angle.

agreed...

[zecg]

..I came, I saw, I dragged stuff around for a second and then introduced the string "*plasma*swf" to Mr. Adblock.

Wikipedia...

[presroi]

Maybe the poster was looking for something like that.

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!).

Ontology as a web term

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What about Dmoz?

[Etcetera]

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.

Okay, so let me guess:

[DingerX]

The viewer brings up at the bottom:

The Website www.slashdot.org does exist.

Wordnet at Princeton

[kronocide]

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/

Re:You keep saying that word...

[msbmsb]

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.

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

[gclef]

let's take a bet. I'm sure we will see a full semantic web worldwide implementation before we see any AI mainstream succes

I'll take the side bet: you'll both be dead before either one happens.

Re:No its not

[DrEasy]

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.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Metadata markup doesn't have to be embedded within the web page, therefore a third party could create RDF statements relating documents that were created by traditional web designers.

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:You keep saying that word...

[UnapprovedThought]

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.)

Re:"Ontology"?

[kronocide]

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.

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