Semantic Web Getting Real

BlueSalamander writes "Tim O'Reilly just did an interview with Devin Wenig, the CEO-designate of Reuters. With no great enthusiasm I started to read yet another interview on how the semantic web was going to make everything great for everybody. Wenig made some good points about the end of the latency wars in news and the beginning of the battle for automatically detecting linkages and connections in the news. Smart news, not just fast news. Great stuff — but just more words? Nope — a little searching revealed that Reuters just opened access to their corporate semantic technology crown jewels. For free. For anyone. Their Calais API lets you turn unstructured text into a formal RDF graph in about one second. I ran about 5,000 documents through it and played with a subset of them in RDF-Gravity. The results were impressive overall. Is this the start of the semantic web getting real? When big names and big money start to act, not just talk, it may be time to pay attention. Semantic applications anyone? The foundation appears to be here."

Comments

In case you have no clue what they're talking abou

[WK2]

If you are like me, and have absolutely positively no dang fucking clue what the summary is talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

According to the Wikipedia history, this concept has been around since at least 2001.

Re:Semantic Spam

[SolitaryMan]

And this seems to be a major problem of the whole semantic web buzz. Search engines like Google can cut down on abuse because they're a third party that is unrelated to the content. The whole semantic web thing offloads categorization to the content source, the very party that is most likely to try to abuse the system. It just doesn't seem like the best idea in the world to me.

I think you are missing the point of Semantic Web: you can refer or link to an object, not just document.

The company declares its URI. Now, If you are writing an article about this company, you can uniquely identify it and every web crawler knows *exactly* what company are you talking about. If the URI for the company is a hyperlink to its web site, then it can't be abused: the company itself declares what it is. The unique URI will in fact be a link to some file with information about company (maybe an RDF file -- doesn't really matter for the concept)

The system can (and will be abused) in the same way as an old web: irrelevant links, words, concepts -- nothing new for the crawler and can be defeated with existing techniques.

Again, Semantic Web = Links between concepts, not just documents, so please do not bury the good idea under the pile of misunderstanding.