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Untangling Web Information
Ostracus writes "The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web — that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. Microsoft's acquisition of the semantic search engine Powerset earlier this year shows faith in this vision. But thus far, little Semantic Web technology has been available to the general public. That's why many eyes will be on Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology that launches publicly today."
semantic web = new buzzword for funding
The advertisers and search engine optimizers have already shown that they have absolutely ZERO qualms about providing false or misleading information to search engine robots in the form of page cloaking, hidden frames, false meta tags, etc so what makes anyone believe that they will not play the same games, possibly with even greater result, against the semantic web? There is money to be made by gaming the system and as long as it is possible for website operators to describe themselves on the semantic web then they will describe themselves in any way they have to to drive traffic to their sites and get ad hits, truth be damned.
Looking for "Penn State" returned two "tweens". One for the Golden State Warriors and the other for State Cell Phone Driving Laws. How relevant.
Oh, and here's to hoping "tween" doesn't catch on as a buzzword... ugh.
Twine seems to be just a generic contextual search engine, as opposed to a pure keyword search engine. While it's a step, it's a very tiny step.
What I want to see is more about the correlation between topics. For example, if I'm looking into PHP templating and search twine, I get a few people's bookmarks on the topic. Nothing especially useful, and definitely nothing I couldn't find elsewhere. With real semantics I'd want to see a list of various templating engines, pro and con articles grouped for each, and maybe other sections on related design patterns and frameworks.
In other words, I want to see semantics. Context search isn't going to make anyone turn their head.
Developers: We can use your help.
...how are they supposed to teach a machine to infer meaning better than they're able to?
I'm seriously wanting to know.
In a nutshell, the goal of the Semantic Web is to bring knowledge representation to the Web (using graphs, networks, binary predicates, however you want to call it).
I've been trying to apply data from the Semantic Web for a few years now.
I can see two roadblocks to mainstream adoption:
* Web data is immensely scruffy. If thousands of people contribute to a dataset without any restrictions, you get a mess (e.g. multiple URIs used to denote the same class or individual, which results in fractured data). Having said that, I can see some convergence happening on reusing URIs (for classes that has happened for a while now, for instances this is getting better every day).
* Without proper data, it's hard to show the benefit of having a web-wide knowledge base. Right now, my marketing pitch for our semantic web search engine is to go "from documents to objects", i.e. you want to locate objects (the person CmdrTaco) rather than documents matching keywords.
Once you have achieved a web-wide knowledge base of decent quality, you can start thinking about how to navigate that information space to actually answer questions (and I don't mean natural language understanding, but a point-and-clic, menu-based interface). CmdrTaco's phone number, people he knows, blog posts he's written, and so on.
The chicken-and-egg circle is slowly breaking up. For a demo, our system is online at http://swse.deri.org/.
I don't think the computers are supposed to do the thinking for us. My understanding of the Semantic Web is an attempt by humans to encode meaning into the markup.
I'll believe it works when I can finally do a search on a keyword like "digicam" and choose an option to exclude any website that is trying to sell me something.
You may respond: "That won't work. Sellers will game the system in some way." Maybe. Or maybe it can be designed in such a way that in order to be able to sell anything they will have to give something on their site "selling" semantics. And the moment they do this it will be possible for a computer to identify them as selling something and exclude them from the search. They can't sell things and not sell things at the same time.
Of course, this cannot possibly work with HTML as we know it, because HTML is just too loose and general. A semantic web will only really work once it becomes impossible to create content that has no semantics. And there lies the problem - the web as we know it is already too deeply entrenched, a bit like the QWERTY keyboard perhaps?