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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."
Yeah, it won't matter until Google starts getting in on the act. When you can search for "a website where I can get free kittens and other pets" and get exactly that, instead of just sites that have those keywords in it (like this message in a day or so), then it will be valuable for people to RDF their site and maybe even look at the mess that the translator makes and clean it up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
IMHO this is not the semantic web. The primary representation is still (just) natural language. Anything in addition to that is really just search engine technology under a different banner. Is that a bad thing? No! I've always said the semantic web was bound to fail because people don't want to spend a lot of extra effort tagging their information so others can slice and dice it; instead, the evolution of natural language processing in search (rather than manual tagging) will solve the problem. Maybe the Reuters idea of exposing the "inferred" metadata will be useful (as opposed to normal searches like google who simply keep this metadata in their own indices), though as yet I don't see why.
Of course you realize that this will just lead to a bunch of neo-netzis with their anti-semantic remarks....
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress