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Semantic Web Under Suspicion
Dr Occult writes "Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called semantic web. The idea is to make the web intelligent by storing data such that it can be analyzed better by our machines, instead of the user having to sort and analyze the data from search engines. From the article: 'Big business, whose motto has always been time is money, is looking forward to the day when multiple sources of financial information can be cross-referenced to show market patterns almost instantly.' However, concern is also growing about the misuses of this intelligent web as an affront to privacy and security."
"Semantic web" might make it easier for HackerBillyBob to find a potential identity fraud victim's information. So basically, HackerBillyBob can get dumber and dumber but do more and more damage. Fortunately the good side of this is PhisherBillyBob can decrease his R&D time because SemantiGoog will give him thousands of ACTIVE email addresses EACH AND EVERY MORNING.
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So I know a lot of people that get all excited when they read articles on the "semantic web."
... you start with a corpus of documents to "seed" it and have experts (or web surfers) contribute little by little until it is accurate. Oh, it must also be able to adapt quickly and stay current.
I think that we are all missing some very important aspects of what it takes to make something capable of what they speak of. In all the projects I have worked on, to create something geared toward this sort of solution, you need two things: training data & a robust taxonomy.
First things first, how would we define or even agree on a taxonomy? By taxonomy, I mean something with breadth & depth that has been used and verified. By breadth I mean that it must be capable of normalization (pharmacetical concoctions, drugs & pills are all the same concept), stemming (go & went are the same action, dog & dogs are the same concept) and also important is how many tokens wide a concept can be. By depth I mean that we must be able to define specificity and use it to our advantage (a site about 747s is scored higher than a site about airline jets which is scored higher than a site about planes). By rigorous I mean that it must be tried and true
Without a taxonomy, how will we index sites and be able to tell between "water tanks" and "panzer tanks." I think that this is one of the great things that Google is missing to really improve its searching abilities. If you suggest an ontology to replace it, the problems encountered in developing it only multiply.
Where is the training data? Well, one may argue that the web content out there will suffice as training data but I think that more importantly, they need collections of traffic for these sites and user behavioral patterns to quickly and adequately deduce what the surfer is in need of.
I feel that these two aspects are missing and the taxonomy may be impossible to achieve.
Why are we even concerned with security if we can't even lay the foundations for the semantic web? I would argue that once we plan it out and determine it's viable, then we concern ourselves with the everyone's rights.
My work here is dung.
What I really want to see is the search engine reduce the duplicated content to single entries (try Googling for a Java classname and you'll see how many Google-searched websites have the API on them), or order them by reoccurrance of the word or phrase giving the context more value than the popularity of the page.
End the FUD
...and growing and evolving.
Take a look at the "blogosphere" and the tagging/classification initiative that's happening there.
Sure, it seems crude and unrefined but it's working, like most grass-roots initiatives do when compared with grandiose "industry standards" and the big, bulky workgroups that try to define them.
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Obligitory Skynet joke in
5...4...3...2...1
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
"Big business, whose motto has always been time is money"
That motto is really "anything for a buck". Even if business has to wait or waste time to get money, it will wait until the cows come home - then sell them.
--
make install -not war
The article would have us believe that this is going to expose everyone to massive amounts of privacy invasion. This is not necessarily the case. It is already the case that there are privacy mechanisms to protect information in the SW (e.g. require agents to authenticate to a site to retrieve restricted information). Beyond simple mechanisms, there is a lot of research being conducted on the idea of trust in the semantic web - e.g. how does my agent know to trust a slashdot article as absolute truth and a wikipedia article as outright fabrication (or vice versa).
As for making the content of the internet widely available, some researchers feel this will never happen. As another commenter noted that it is essential that there is agreement in the definition of concepts (ontologies) to enable the SW to work (if my agent believes the symbol "apple" refers to the concept Computer, and your agent believes it refers to "garbage", we may have some interesting but less than useful results). I am researching ontology generation using information extraction / NLP techniques, and it is certainly a difficult problem, and one that isn't likely to have a trivial problem (in some respects, this is goes back to the origins of AI in the 1950's, and we're still hacking at it today).
For some good references on the Semantic Web (beyond Wikipedia), check out some of these links
You could already do this semantic web nonsense if people would just stick to a standard and be honest with what they publish.
Nobody wants to do that however. Mobile phone companies always try to make their offering sound as attractive as possible by highlighting the good points and hiding the bad ones. Phone stores try to cut through this by making their own charts for comparing phone companies but in turn try to hide the fact that they get a bigger cut from some companies then others.
It wouldn't be at all hard to set up a standard that would make it very easy to tell what cell phone subscription is best for you. Getting the companies involved to participate is impossible however.
This is the real problem with searching the web right now. It wouldn't be at all hard to use google today if everyone was honest with their site content. For instance, removed the word "review" from a product page if no review is available.
Do you think this is going to happen anyday soon? No, then the semantic web will not be with us anyday soon either.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How many people read this and thought "Okay, what have they done with Norton now?"
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All the hoopla around the Semantic Web reminds me exactly of the days "XML" became the latest high-flying meme touted by "tech" writers en masse. Witness:
The semantic search engine would then cross-reference all of the information about hotels in Majorca, including checking whether the rooms are available, and then bring back the results which match your query.
And here in all its glory is the 1999 version:
The software would then use XML to cross-reference all of the information about hotels in Majorca, including checking whether the rooms are available, and then bring back the results which match your query.
Of course, the problem with this fantasy of XML was that no standardization of schemas led to an infinite mix of tagging and thus, the laypersons idea that "this XML document can be read and understood by any software" was pure bunk.
Granted, the semantic web addresses many of these problems, but IMHO the underlying problem remains: layers of context on top of content still need to be parsed and understood.
So the question remains: will the Semantic Web be implemented in a useful fashion before some develops a Contextual Web Mining system that understands web content to a degree that it fufills the promise of the Semantic Web without additional context?
Disclaimer: I work on contextual web content extraction software so yes I may be biased towards this solution, but I really think the Semantic Web has a insanely high hurdle (proper implementation in millions of web pages) before we can tell how successful it is.
The semantic web would have to be feasible before it posed some sort of threat, so I wouldn't get too up in arms about this.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
"All of this data is public data already," said Mr Glaser. "The problem comes when it is processed."
The privacy and security concerns are bizarre. They're saying that there is currently an implicit "security through obscurity" and that's ok. However, if someone were to make available data more easily found, then it would be less secure?
Here's a radical thought; don't make any data public you don't want someone to see. Blaming Google because you put your home address on your blog and "bad people" found you is absurd. If data is sensitive it shouldn't be there now.
You can't really bitch about peeping Tom's if you built the glass house.
I am both a sceptic and a fan of the SW. I dislike XML serialization of RDF (and RDFS and OWL) - to me the SW is a knowledge engineering task and frankly 20 year old Lisp systems seem to offer a friendlier notation and a much better working environment. If you are a Lisp-er, check out the (now) open source Loom system that supplies a descriptive logic reasoner and other goodies.
The Protege project provides a good (and free) editor for working on ontologies - you might want to grab a copy and work through a tutorial.
I think that the SW will take off, but its success will be a grass roots type of effort: simple ontologies will be used in an adhoc sort of way and the popular ones might become defacto standards. I don't think that a top-down standards approach is going to work.
I added a chapter on the SW to my current Ruby book project, but it just has a few simple examples because I wanted to only use standard Ruby libraries -- no dependencies makes it easier to play with.
I had a SW business idea a few years ago, hacked some Lisp code, but never went anywhere with it (I tend to stop working on my own projects when I get large consulting jobs): define a simple ontology for representing news stories and writing an intelligent scraper that could create instances, given certain types of news stories. Anyway, I have always intended to get back to this idea someday.
The thing is, SKYNET was a military based computer and it gave us "Judgement Day".
..
I dare hypothesize that if a truly intlligent web ever arose, it would have a strong porn background.
I shudder to think of what it's version of Judgement Day would be
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
The huge, glaring issue with the Semantic Web idea that I see is: how do you force the creators of web content to put the right semantic tags on their content? What's to stop there being thousands of sites full of nothing but semantic tags so that even Swoogling for "747" brings up porn first? The clear answer is that the tags will have to be out of the control of the creators of the web content. That means somebody or someTHING else - namely, your Semantic Web search engine of choice - has to figure out your site's tags for you. And the ONLY way to accurately judge, classify and rank a web page is by its actual, real content. This is just another way of looking at the same problem. I'm waiting to be impressed.
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