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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."
is the users.
Not the ones searching but the ones creating the content.
They'll be some idiot out there (like there is now) that will code his data in a way that guarantees that he gets the most page views etc. So often searched terms will turn up on search indexes and other ilk.
It's a loosing proposition unless you come up with filters but then they have their own set of problems.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
"Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user."
Here I was, thinking we were arguing over Semantics...
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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.
The biggest problem with the semantic web is spam. If you can trust the tags, it's a beautiful idea. If you can't, it's worse than useless - it's a waste of time. Google has the right idea, automatic extraction of semantics from content. If there's no real content, then (hopefully) that will be reflected in the semantic analysis.
Me, I estimate we're 5-10 years away from doing anything terribly useful with all of this stuff, but I can definitely envision the day when an internet without semantics seems as distant as an internet without Google.
Thanks for the illustration of what Norvig meant. How is "Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig" (original article) semantically equivalent to "fellow Google exec" (Slashdot summary)? The latter suggests that Tim Berners-Lee too is a Google exec, which would be news to him.
It's really, really difficult to get people to follow rules. We're lazy, we're incompetent (yes), and some of us are evil. I still don't think I truly understand how RDF is supposed to work exactly, and it doesn't even seem like it will be fun to try.
On the other hand, it's really easy to release a million monkeys and let the create what they will. It's not so easy to sort through what they end up producing, but Google does a surprisingly good job of this.
It reminds me of the early days of the Web, when companies like CompuServe and AOL wanted to design and own all content. On the other hand, an internet server with httpd let anybody make a ~/public_html directory and put up whatever they wanted to. The million monkeys won that battle. I think they'll win this one, too.
From http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2004/03/do nt-blame-the-users
Maybe the Semantic Web should aim to be useful to people rather than require people to be useful to it. There has to be a better way than trying to educate droves of people to a problematic and vulnerable design.
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
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.
That anti-semantic bastard...
True, the web had a similar problem, however creating a webpage is a lot more interesting (you see the results directly, how terrible they might be you do see a result) than structuring data. The latter takes a lot more work, and the direct benefit just isn't there.
Sem-Web-like standards like RSS, XML and SOAP have become mainstream, but primarily because they fill a gap. The adoption of RDF or OWL simply doesn't solve anything. Yet. It would be cool to let agents loose onto the semantic web and retrieve them together with a summary on a certain subject using a multitude of sources, but as long as it's easier to Google I don't think it would generate any interest outside academia.
Feel free to prove me wrong though.
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The idea of RDF is applicable to much more than public innerweb content. I've spent the last 7 months researching and developing an RDF backed system for my company's core products. Everyone should think of the value of RDF beyond the scope of trust, and then it becomes easy to realise methods of simple non-web implementation. We can all spend the next 5 years pondering how we're going to figure trusted content providers for RDF web data, or we can just start developing apps for sources which understand themselves as trusted (ie. data input from an individual, employees of a company, and any group where the individual must be accountable for their actions). Whats more important than the blind trust of sources, is data verfication. There are ways to run data input from one user by another user, without doing it in an infringing, demanding way, for validation. I'd like to go into detail of exactly what I mean by all this, but I don't want to violate any portion of my NDA or tip off industry competition (I know that sounds retarded, sorry). If RDF does gain popularity, I can say it will from within the private sector, not the public. Genious implementation may bring RDF to the public sector, but thats not something I would say is guaranteed to happen.
Current technical obstacles to creating any RDF applcation: The matter of complexity of its integration into DB backed systems (popular methods), and instatiated class marshaling within not-so-object oriented languages. The technical design and implementation of a standards compliant RDF system has been extremely difficult for me. I don't think it would ever be possible to get RDF data represented nearly as minimally as you could with simple relational tables (although formally no more bloated than bloaty XML). RDF also creates many long linked relationships; this tends to create some serious performance issues in querying the data. Lastly, I hate XML, and you can't always correctly export from RDF to XML (capable type to incapable type) in a correct manner.
This remind me of the famous Semantic knigth parody...
Bingo! You've just proven that the incompetence spreads beyond MySpace.
The problem with the semantic web movement is this: You have the web guys from the W3C who got famous by building kinda crappy, but effective technology (HTTP, HTML, etc...) going goo goo gah gah over PhD Ontologists from the AI community. They team up and build these great things that the average person (including the people who think they are really really smart, like the Slashdot editors), has no chance in hell of using effectively. What'll happen, is that eventually there will be useful Semantic content and Intelligent Agents doing great things, but that work will be done by a select few. The unwashed masses will still be the domain of Google.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
As I pointed out in the previous comment authoring data on the semantic web is no more difficult than authoring RSS or XML.
Yes, figuring out for the first time how to represent your data in RDF (or XML for that matter) can be difficult. Imagine if everyone was trying to come up with an RSS standard on his own instead of using RSS export functionality of his content management tool. That's why we need good guidelines how to publish information on the semantic web. And RDF export functionality (plugins) similar to what RSS plugins are doing.
As for opportunities for spammers and mischief - don't think so.
Why? - If you look at the Semantic Web "layer cake" you will notice such technologies as digital signatures, encryption and trust being part of the scheme. They allow to identify the author of data and ensure he is what he claims to be. There is nothing wrong with your application if it only accepts signed and trusted data. And there is nothing preventing authors of the data from signing the contents. Since the semantic web is a new technology and we already know about problems that spam and misuse can present it is more not less prepared to fight spam.
Note1: Semantic web should be viewed as an integral part of the existing web, not its opposite. Might even be that it can provide an additional layer that will help to combat spam and other problems you mention here. Who knows.
Note2: Spammers will always try to come up with new exploits. We all have to be prepared for this and think how to close the holes they are using. But saying that newer (a further development of existing [web]) is necessarily more opportunities for spammers in wrong.
Ugh, this is the major misconception of proper Semantic Web implementation.
There are two user types of Semantic Web materia: the individual user and the group.
The individual user only cares about context. It's like a Proustian adventure for him. If he tags Slashdot as "blatherscyte" because that's how he views it, then that's valid. If he tags it as "cmdrTaco" because he is stalking Rob, then that's valid, too. And if he tags it as "monkey" because one time he was petting a monkey while he viewed the site, then that's valid, too. It's like the old saying, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." There are no wrong semantics for the individual user, because it is his context alone which defines the usefulness of a tag.
For this reason, the individual user should be allowed to tag freely and without limits, and also be able to edit or remove tags later.
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Now for the group, they have a different goal. Context does them no good, because they don't have the same context. Their goal then is consensus. Take your problem at FreeDB. The simple solution is to let people vote on the accuracy of disputed tags. Or flag ones they view as incorrect, and then review those that meet a certain threshold for flagging. Basically, you want the group to filter out things that don't apply to the group, WHILE maintaining individual context. You don't delete the tags that the group has rejected - you just hide them from the person who has come to view the group tags.
I think this dichotomy of group vs. individual is what has gotten us into trouble with the Semantic Web. To use one example, I think delicious' big mistake was to show you "popular" tags for a given link. What that does is encourages you not to create your own tags, but instead just piggyback on popularity. Over time, this creates homogeny, which is great for the group, but not for the individual user. Sure, they can probably find that link again in a minimal amount of time, but if an individual tag might help them find it faster, but they shunned individual tags for groupthink, so much the worse for them.
And on the flipside if you don't provide proper weighting and trust metrics into your tagging system, you are opening yourself up to not only abuse and inappropriate behavior, but also to the "incompetence" mentioned in the article, which is not so much incompetence as a zero-filter. It's like reading Slashdot at -1. It's kind of a touchy-feely way to look at it, but in Web 2.0 thinking, it's bad to delete content; just filter it out instead. It's bad to censor opinions from the software side; let each user do their own stifling. Give the users complete control over the content, and they will find models that work. It's that simple.
The main problem with the Google guy's point is that philosophically, Google is more groupthink than individual user, because they're a search engine. They value consensus over context. In the future, perhaps they will value context a little bit more than they do. Until then, they have to stand where they stand, because they can't let context into their system. They've tried some clunky mechanisms to do so (Personal Search, anyone?) but until they get it right, the Semantic Web won't have any value to them.
That was the entire point of my post! The group benefits from standardization, but the individual suffers. The Semantic Web is an attempt to give power back to the individual user. Subjectivity is a crucial element of the system, and sanitized, standardized, NPOV systems deny the individual subjectivity.
Delicious is very smart in that it left the *option* for customised tags, but they are clearly saying by implication that the best tags are the ones everyone else is using. My point being that the idea of a "standardized vocabulary" is antithetical to the ideals of the Semantic Web. We don't want a democracy of ideas; we want a free market of ideas!
Think of the concept "funny." Let's say I asked you to go to 100 different random sites and tag them as funny or not funny. Let's say that of the sites you listed as funny, it was clear you enjoyed witty, New Yorker-style humor, and not fart jokes. But let's say 99 other people did the same thing, and they did the opposite: they clearly enjoyed the fart jokes, and hated the New Yorker wit.
Now if you asked this seeded engine for a recommendation of a new, 101st site that was funny, should it give you fart jokes, or New Yorker style? This is the power of the Semantic Web. What's funny to you, isn't funny to everyone else. Why should you be punished for that? And if a total n00b comes to our engine for a recommendation, they get the fart jokes page, because it assumes they're like everyone else. But if they start marking those sites as not funny, eventually it'll figure out they're more like you, and start giving them sites that you like.
Now, will delicious ever do that? Of course not, because it doesn't offer any discrimination to you on the word funny. You get the democratic version of funny. Fart Jokes for all. And that's what "standardization" has to offer. So, no, you can keep that; I want the Internet to understand who I am, and what I like, not what everyone else likes. And if they HAPPEN to coincide, that's fine, so much the better - things are popular because of the people, after all - but they shouldn't have to.