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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.
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.
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.
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!).
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/
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.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
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:
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.Yes, in a world in which 95% of users can't grasp simple boolean modifiers, such a scheme would surely be a success!
TODO: Something witty here...
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."
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?
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
"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.