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The Semantic Web Going Mainstream

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-not-the-virus-company dept.

Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.

4 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. no ads please by randuev · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19627 for those who don't want the ads
    but even without ads the article is very shallow. how is it "semantic" web exactly?

    1. Re:no ads please by Intron · · Score: 2, Informative

      The W3C part is to add semantic information to web pages and other data so that you can use it in multiple applications (like twine, I guess). Right now, data I get from a web page is only good for me to look at, but with semantic markup I could automatically import it into other uses.

      An example would be going over my finances at the end of the month. Right now I get either a paper statement, or log into each account, and then copy numbers over to Quicken. This would allow me to set up Quicken to automatically log in to all my accounts, balance my checkbook and generate a report of income and expenses for the month. It sounds good in principle, but I think the devil is in the details.

      --
      Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
  2. Attack of the Misunderstood Acronyms! by the+linux+geek · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Written with the Semantic Web Standards, called W3C, in mind."

    Yikes. That's horrible.

  3. Re:Goofy project by porter235 · · Score: 2, Informative
    What you seem to fail to recognize, is that the semantic web is not about teaching computers how to analyze our language (syntax) to extract semantics, but rather us agreeing on how to add syntax to our our data so that the computer can understand the semantics.

    For example, the following chunk of code explicitly defines the creator, title, description, and date of an audio file. Because it has been specifically marked up, and IF we can all agree to use the Dublin core namespace for describing that type of data, then we can write programs that can gather, correlate, and make deductions about that info from multiple sources.

    <rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
     
      <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://media.example.com/audio/guide.ra">
     
          <dc:creator>Rose Bush</dc:creator>
          <dc:title>A Guide to Growing Roses</dc:title>
          <dc:description>Describes process for planting and nurturing different kinds of rose bushes.</dc:description>
          <dc:date>2001-01-20</dc:date>
     
      </rdf:Description>
    </rdf:RDF>