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Challenging the Ideas Behind the Semantic Web
mytrip writes to tell us that after a recent presentation to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Tim Berners-Lee was challenged by fellow Google exec Peter Norvig citing some of the many problems behind the Semantic Web. From the article: "'What I get a lot is: "Why are you against the Semantic Web?" I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first,' Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user."
The current semantic web seems to offer a technology too fragile to use on the global scale. The complexity of various classification and ontological schemes, work needed to provide the metadata etc. Also, semantic web seems to offer great opporturnities for spammers and other mischief makers. Now we already have comment and reference spamming, but semantic web (on the global scale) raises the possibilities enormously.
Sure, the technical limitations of Joe Public might slow the growth of the Semantic Web on the whole, but what few people realize is that the Semantic Web has already existed for years in in-house or limited-audience networks. Just look at FOAFnaut (an update in a few weeks will return it to full usability) or the very much real-world examples in Geroimenko & Chen's Visualizing the Semantic Web (Springer, 2005).
In one of the very first papers mentioning the Semantic Web, some paragraph was devoted to something then lost in the hype around the semantic web: the Web of trust, which had to be something like a certification of metadata. This is perhaps to be again regarded as important for the semantic web and the web in general (although not easy to manage).
By the way, Norvig is not only a Google exec, but also a well known AI researcher, author of one of most important books on that subject.
Slightly offtopic. Peter Norvig gave a talk at my university on similar topics, and there was a short Q&A afterwards.
:)
One of the students asked him what he did for his 20% project. He said that he was usually too busy keeping tabs on what the other employees were doing with their 20% time, so he didn't quite get around to working on his. He told us what he wanted to do, as motivation for himself.
The basic idea is that when he used to work for NASA, it'd always make him upset when people saw faces in random spots on the moon's terrain, and claimed it was aliens that NASA was covering up, or similar. So, he was planning on taking facial recognition software and running it on all of google earth. I think it'd be pretty awesome..
Any progress yet, Mr. Norvig? I'd love to see the results..
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It's the business users too that are a problem. I'm currently trying to get a project on the rails based on semantic web technology, and I'm confronted with an IT department where some are even struggling with the difference between subtyping and instantiation- let alone more advanced modelling issues... It doesnt help ofcourse that most people never even heard of conceptual modelling languages such as ORM but instead were thought to use uml and ER where it's the modellers' responsibility to make a distinction between what is conceptual, logical and physical which ofcourse most never did.
In regards to the google issue I think the idea that you should crawl everything is faulty cause you need to be able to trust the source. Most ontologies will simply be restricted to a certain domain and corresponding user group, often in a b2b context. Integrating every man and his dog, the lawnmower and the kitchen sink with some kind of top level ontology is merely a nice-to-have philosophical issue that I dont expect to be solved in the near future, if only cause we havent seen much advances since Aristole started toying around with the idea. In other words, at google they are worried about an issue that's atleast a decade away from now, probably even more.
The problem with users (authors) is valid when we consider individual authors creating data (RDF, HTML, ...) "by hand". TimBL has referred to the Semantic Web as a global database of knowledge (as compared to the current web of text content). The problem of incompetent users goes away and higher value of data is achieved when exposing already existing content and databases on the Semantic Web. Think sites like SlashDot, wordpress.com, amazon.com, NY Times, ...
Authoring of RDF data is not so different from authoring XML or RSS. This means that costs of putting your site on the Semantic Web are quite low. The benefits are a global reuse of information.
For example: it is easy to install WordPress SIOC plugin to export RDF from any WordPress based weblog. Individual users don't have to care what RDF is or looks like. And the data about all posts and comments are now computer readable and can be reused in a number of ways, e.g., to create a TimeLine of your posts.
If we take this approach and expose data from existing sites in RDF, the task of authoring quality data can be accomplished. The problem of spam referred in the article can be dealt with by signing the information - since Semantic Web is still young the problems of misuse can be addressed in the architecture right from the beginning.
I would like to focus your attention in another important area - consumers of Semantic Web data. There is and will be quality data out there. What is interesting now is to find new and useful ways to use this information and add value over what can be done with simple web pages.