Semantic Search Points To Better Relevancy

ReadWriteWeb writes in to tell us about an article by Dr. Riza C. Berkan, founder and CEO of hakia.com, describing the promise of and potential for semantic search. This approach to providing more on-target search results contrasts with the dream of the semantic Web. Semantic search doesn't require all the Web page authors in the world to begin adding metadata; but it's not a sure thing that the researchers now developing the idea will get it right.

Comments

Re:The semantic web is still a Good Thing

[kahei]

Honestly, if some Marxist state from the 60s produced propaganda like that, everyone would laugh:

"The People's Revolution is about more than nationalism! New communal agricultural techniques will enable a standard of living of a completely different nature than today! Manufacturing and distributing goods for the Workers could be taken to a whole new level!"

It's the same fallacy: "If only everyone spontaneously got together and did what I think they should, all problems would go away!"

Yet just because the fictional utopia in question is the 'Semantic Web' rather than the 'Workers Paradise', everybody takes it really seriously. And nobody mocks it at all. Nope, nobody ever laughs at the Semantic Web.

Ok, ok, I'm just being mean, I should go and do something useful.

Tiresome and wrong

[dread]

There is a huge problem with the argument made in the article - one which is plainly visible in the "Palladium" example. The meaning of "Palladium" is related to an internal state (i.e. my internal state). What am *I* thinking about when I write "Palladium"? Am I referring to the element Palladium? Am I referring to the DRM technologies from Microsoft? This is dependent on three things primarily:
1: my "role". What am I? Am I a journalist at a newspaper? Am I a private citizen with a large collection of illgotten mp3s?
2: my "context". Am I discussing something? Is this a query related to a conversation I am having with someone else? God only knows how many Google queries actually stem from ongoing IM-conversations where a, to the reader, previously unknown term/subject is brought forward.
3: my "personality". What am I primarily interested in? What is my preferred format of consumtion? If I am 7 years old - what the hell does "Palladium" really mean?

To me it is obvious that the idea of a semantic web, the promise if you will, can never be delivered upon without a framework that is usercentric rather than centralistic in the current Googlefashion. Desktop search is interesting to some extent as a way of tying our personal space with the dataspace outside of our local control but that is still a very limited tool. Since much of what is very simplistically covered in 1 and 2 above is related to interpersonal communication it becomes obvious that what is necessary is data structures that learn from ongoing conversation, eg the intersection of Person A and Person B is described in a way that can give us guidance as to what the appropriate (or most likely) interpretation of the term used is.

There is much that can be said about this but suffice to say that the semantic web people are ignoring the real needs that have to be met in order to create something that is truly semantic and carries a knowledge of what the end user actually intends. Because if we don't understand the intent, we don't really understand anything.