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Semantic Web Getting Real

Posted by kdawson on from the open-it-up-and-give-it-away dept.

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."

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Yawn... by icebike · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So I need this WHY?

    Most websites have little to say, and take all day to say it.
    Having a detailed graphical analysis of the blather seems unlikely to improve the situation. GI,GO.

    It would seem spending just a tad more time writing for HUMANS would be way more productive than writing for machines. Having a thousand computers watching your 100 monkeys seems unlikely to bring enlightenment or useful knowledge out of a pile of garbage and human blathering that passes for information on the web these days.

    People used to write web pages.
    Now they write software to write web pages.
    Its not surprising they now need to write software to understand the web pages.
    Whats the point?

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    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    1. Re:Yawn... by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Writing AI that can read English (and all the other languages) and figure out the meaning is just, well, taking too long. But let's say it wasn't.. what would be the point? Would you say there was no point? Or would you say it was freakin' awesome and look forward to the day when you can actually ask a question and get a sensible answer from a machine?

      Well, if we are very forgiving we can get this kind of thing happening with current technology, we just have to supply all the "content" in a form that our primitive algorithms can handle. The Semantic Web is that. Maybe around the 3rd generation of these algorithms we might be ready to do the translation to machine form automatically.. maybe not.. but at least the Semantic Web people are again talking about translation.. was a time when they all said it was a fruitless path and the best way was to just supply applications for creating machine readable content easily.

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      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Yawn... by daigu · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'll tell you why you need it. It provides another layer of abstraction. Let's try a few illustrative examples.

      1. Let's say you work for a Fortune 500 company and you get over 10,000 emails a day from customers complaining. Do you think it is better to read each one or have a tool that abstracts it to graphically display key concepts that they are complaining about so management can do something about it today?

      2. You are a clinical researcher in Cancer and have a terabyte of unstructured patient data. Can you think how text descriptions of pathology reports might be displayed graphically against outcomes to suggest some interesting insights?

      There's a lot of useful information that isn't on blogs - although it would be useful for them too. You need to exercise a bit more imagination.