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Untangling Web Information

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-don't-understand-you dept.

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."

20 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First, before anything even really started, The Semantic Web was merely a pipe dream.

    But that was the long long ago, so let's fast forward a few years. When its future looked most bleak, Sir Tim (who can summon fire and explosions at will) told us what to expect .... twice. And we were happy.

    Then a few years passed and nothing.

    Until the 2006 World Wide Web conference made us suspicious of the Semantic Web. We spread rumors about the Semantic Web and told all the cooler technologies that the Semantic Web was just out to rape our privacy. So we challenged the Semantic Web. And claimed it would fail.

    Just when I was expecting Sir Tim to get underneath a blanket & release a sobbing YouTube video of everyone being bastards for attacking The Semantic Web right when she was going through really tough times and that we should all just leave her alone ... the Semantic Web went mainstream and started getting real.

    I've got no problem with people pushing technologies but this one sounds more like a soap opera than anything. Has the Semantic Web changed anything for anyone on Slashdot? I haven't seen anything directly if it has ...

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      First off, that was brilliant.

      I've got no problem with people pushing technologies but this one sounds more like a soap opera than anything. Has the Semantic Web changed anything for anyone on Slashdot? I haven't seen anything directly if it has ...

      My problem is simply this: Assuming a "semantic web" existed right here and now, how would I use it? Google I can understand: Go there, fill in the blank with whatever I can think of, hit "Search" and hope for the best.

      Trying to get a computer to understand the meaning of a web page is, fundamentally, getting machines to do my thinking for me. In my experience, they're pretty bad at it.

      And that's not even considering sites with political spin; how would a machine work out the meaning there? Someone's going to say it's wrong, and if that someone is the user performing the search, then the semantic search is going to take the blame.

      This will also lead to "Semantic Engine Optimizers" figuring out how to polish turd websites into something that even shows up, which makes the semantic web less useful. About as useful as, say, Google is now.

      The "Semantic Web" to me is like the future: everyone has their own idea of how it will be, and the reality will disappoint them. Ideas are cheap, and at this point, nobody should care unless they're actually going to make something out of them.

      When a semantic search engine ships that is actually useful, let me know. Until then, I'll stick with the best semantic search engine I've ever seen: the people I know.

    2. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by squoozer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I worked, in a research capacity, on technologies for building the semantic web for a while and to be quite honest with you I can't see how it could ever work in the real world. Just in the department I was in there must have been a dozen different ideas for how to build a semantic web and the only thing that tied them all together was the fact that they all relied on humans doing a lot of work to tell a computer what the content was about.

      I'm sure that some of this semantic web technology will be useful somewhere but it's not going to take the world by storm simply because it doesn't work well enough and it requires too much up front effort for possibly / probably no gain.

      The only way I can really see it working is if we can develop AI to the point where it can actually understand what it is reading without a human having to first develop some huge ontology and join the dots for it. But that's just my opinion.

      --
      I used to have a better sig but it broke.
    3. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by CaptainPatent · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't think it has changed anything yet . However in order to get a fully functional semantic organizer you have to teach a computer English first, then tell it to search. English is my own native tongue so I personally don't remember learning it, however I do have several friends that learned later in life and it was a bear teaching them grammatical exceptions and expressions that do not have consistent meaning (and there are a ton of them.)

      Computers are getting closer and can "understand" some basic phrases and grammar, but on the whole remain mostly useless because of everything they miss. I think semantic internet implementations are possible, but the reason it hasn't changed anyone's life is that it's still a long ways off.

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    4. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by omnichad · · Score: 2, Informative

      You'd hope if it was smart enough to pull off something like world annihilation that it would try and figure out its own power and maintenance needs for all eternity first, right?

    5. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by quietwalker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This about sums up my experience with it as well.

      First we started off with categories, and tags in our searches. Then we switched to no-searching, but a filter-based tree mechanism for reducing the number of hits - instead of a table of contents. Then we switched to a table of contents using "task", "product" +4 other tree 'heads'. Then they started mulling over per-sentence tagging. It kept ballooning because it was obvious that though we had all these tags and a hierarchy and divisions, it didn't help - our customers used google to search for our help doc rather than our internal systems/help application.

      In the end, they decided that they needed to automatically categorize everything. I tried to point out the futility of it, and what that would get them, but no one really wanted to listen. They were very surprised in the end when they got a search engine that looked for keywords.

      Exactly what the help system they started with already did.

      The two biggest problems with semantic-anything is

      1) it doesn't provide any additional value without an exponentially increasing order level of (human) effort,
                    and
      2) Unless someone comes up with a single, agreed upon, final, categorization (an ontology) - your markup will always disagree with someone elses, except for the most simple things that would be noted by search engines looking for keywords.

      When I left, the project had been ongoing for 3 years, and they still didn't know what they wanted it to do - they were still searching for purpose and changing the target every day. ... we didn't share an office, did we?

    6. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by blahplusplus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Trying to get a computer to understand the meaning of a web page is, fundamentally, getting machines to do my thinking for me. In my experience, they're pretty bad at it."

      They're pretty bad at it NOW, personally I think the web would get infinitely better if all user tastes and profiles were congregated, as they are at delicious, so people with similar interests are pointed to the results found by others. That's one thing I like about delicious, you can browse the bookmarks of others who have "done the thinking" for you.

      Sooner or later machines WILL get good at it, but it means giving up any kind of privacy, since the machine would have to have some kind of intimate knowledge about what you do, talk about, email, bookmark, etc, to make the results of searches more relevant.

      I've noticed context adds in gmail getting suspiciously relevant and good, over the past couple of months, I have found services I would not have found on my own.

    7. Re:The Story of the Semantic Web--Slashdot Style! by iangoldby · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

  2. my future by nimbius · · Score: 4, Funny

    will include a digital rights management compliant
    cloud based on a service oriented architecture
    that will empower my workgroup over the new semantic web 2.0

    insert license fee here.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:my future by eln · · Score: 4, Funny

      With that many buzzwords, you must be on to something huge!

      Here's a check for $200 million.

      Regards,
      Venture Capitalists

    2. Re:my future by Fallingcow · · Score: 2, Funny

      1999 called, they miss you and want you to come back ;)

  3. Semantic Web vs The Advertisers by CodeBuster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Baby steps by truthsearch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:twine "semantic"? how about no. by I+cant+believe+its+n · · Score: 4, Funny

    It works like a charm. I entered "parsing" as an area of interest and it came back with "Beer"...

    I was quite surprised by how quickly it understood me and my interests based on such a limited amount of information :-)

    --
    She made the willows dance
  6. Humans don't often get symantics... by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...how are they supposed to teach a machine to infer meaning better than they're able to?

    I'm seriously wanting to know.

  7. Re:Semantics by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Indeed, <meta content="sex, porn, titties, hotties, clit, cunt, naked, nude">

    Of course it's not really a porn site, but the site operator found that it gave him hits. My (admittedly limited) look at the "semantic web" shows no sign that it will be any less suceptable to being gamed.

    --
    Free Martian Whores!
  8. Proper data first, then cool applications by aharth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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/.

  9. Anti-Semantism by Grashnak · · Score: 3, Funny

    Buncha anti-semantists on this site.

    --
    Life needs more saving throws.
  10. It's not. by Stu+Charlton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All the semantic web gives you is the ability to layer a logical design over data. It's like a database design, except it's "open world", meaning there can be many different designs, it's up to the agent to pick the one it trusts, and it can't really make assumptions based on what it doesn't know.

    The only inferences made are those that have been imagined by some human designer. And they might be very wrong , if the designer was wrong.

    The "kinds" of inferences available are also pretty limited, like hierarchy or transitivity, or set membership. Useful, yes, but stepping stones...

    --
    -Stu
  11. Healthcare Life sciences? by copdk4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I worked at a big tech company doing SemWeb, where my experience was exactly the same. Everyone was scratching their head.

    Now I've moved into Healthcare IT environment, where SemWeb makes perfect sense. Its like the best tool for the job.

    The essential difference is what end of the stick you are picking up. The tech folks who are trying to shoe-horn RDF/OWL onto anything n everything (e.g. search) are failing. On the other hand, Healthcare/Life science folks who have to work with heavy knowledge intensive stuff, its working like a charm.

    The SemWeb story is quite similar to Amazon Kindle.. wherein the tech folks are hating it whereas real users are all over it.. So it might seem like a failure to all you tech bozos.. but the domain experts are lovin' it.