Nepomuk Brings Semantic Web To the Desktop, Instead

An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review has a story looking at Nepomuk — the semantic tool that is bundled with the latest version of KDE. It seems that some Semantic Web researchers believe the tool will prove a breakthrough for semantic technology. By encouraging people to add semantic meta-data to the information stored on their machines they hope it could succeed where other semantic tools have failed."

Comments

Care to explain?

[Leafheart]

What exactly is semantic web, and why haven't I ever heard of it?

Re:Care to explain?

[radtea]

The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup", which allows users/editors/etc to tag content (text, images, data) using a standard format that can be read, processed and exchanged by machines which can then give users more useful pointers to stuff that they care about.

The Semantic Web has failed for a bunch of reasons, with many people tending to blame the tools. However, those of us of a particular epistemological bent believe that it is doomed in principle as current conceived because "meaning" is a verb, not an adjective.

"These data mean X" is completely incoherent on this view of meaning, like saying "This smell of orange blossoms has Republican leanings." "Meaning" is simply not an attribute of data, any more than political tendencies are an attribute of scents.

The Semantic Web fails to capture almost everything about the entities that do the meaning (people) but instead is based on the belief that meaning is a property of data. Data inspires meaning, but meaning is something that humans do, and the Semantic Web has no effective mechanism for capturing this, although with sufficient markup by many individuals on the same data it should be possible to do something similar to ROC evaluation of the ways people mean, which would greatly enhance the utility of the Semantic Web.

A colleague who works in GIS pointed out an consequence of this phenomena to me many years ago when he described an experiment involving a bunch of geologists mapping a particular terrain. At the end of the day, after integrating all their inputs, he could tell who mapped where, but not what anybody mapped.

Re:Care to explain?

[giuntag]

Explained better than I could ever do: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Re:Care to explain?

[anomalous cohort]

I disagree. First of all, the semantic web is just about allowing content creators to associate context with their content to facilitate a context sensitive search. The semantic web has lackluster adoption because google does a great job at context sensitive search without the context providing meta-data markup.

A more limited version of semantic web has achieved some notable traction. Microformats are another way of associating context with content that is more agreeable with content providers.

A more compelling technology offering than Nepomuk for advancing semantic web would be Reuters' OpenCalais project. That's the one you should be watching. Another interesting trend to watch is how semantic web is affecting the more popular collective intelligence movement.

Re:Care to explain?

[grcumb]

It describes the ability to add metadata to web content (tags, etc), and you haven't heard of it because web 2.0 is the more popular term. ;)

Wrong and wrong. Sort of. 8^)

The Semantic Web is the term coined by Tim Berners Lee, describing the ability to associate data using inference (rather than explicit reference). In his conception, it relies on XML data formats and the ability to use common elements to translate between one and the other.

It's not a terribly easy concept to grok at first, but the basic premise is that in data transformation, you only need to know the two steps closest to you in order to translate (and process) data from numerous other sources. As long as we know how to get from A to B and B to C, we can go straight from A to C.

The vision of the Semantic Web, therefore, is of a Web that is completely transparent, because XML data encapsulation and transformation is ultimately universal, albeit with the presence of an unknown number of intermediate steps.

Metacrap rant from Corey Doctorow

[pzs]

There's a good rant from Corey Doctorow about this. I think the best phrase that summaries people's high hopes for the semantic web is "nerd hubris".

You got that exactly backwards

[MarkusQ]

The Semantic Web is a failed attempt to extend the WWW via "semantic markup", which allows users/editors/etc to tag content (text, images, data) using a standard format that can be read, processed and exchanged by machines which can then give users more useful pointers to stuff that they care about.

You got that exactly backwards.

The WWW was an earlier doomed attempt at semantic markup, and up until the summer of '93 or so it looked like it might work. That's when the early rants about people using the tags to control layout instead of too convey meta information (e.g. using em to get italics in a bibliography, dt/dd to make roman numeral lists, etc.) started--or at least when I first became aware of them. In fact, pretty much the entire history of HTML has been a tension between the language's designers and purist, who want users to care about what markup means, even if it does nothing, and the vast majority of users who only care about what it does regardless of the "meaning" that may be ascribed to it. Once you can get your head around both perspectives some of the goofier things in the whole tawdry history (the Table Wars, XML, CSS) make a lot more sense.

Ok, a little more sense. But only if you already knew what people are like.

--MarkusQ

Re:This indexing fad should curl up and die

[lennier]

"Everybody and his uncle tries to make systems that will index every piece of crap on your PC and it invariably results in a useless and horrible waste of resources."

On the contrary, we should seriously be asking ourselves *why*, when all our data is sitting there on our PCs, we've let ourselves get into such a state of disorganisation at the operating system level that a class of program called 'indexer' exists as a third-party tool in the first place.

How come it's not already taken as given that the primary thing an operating system *does* is, you know, *know where all its data is*?

It's as if we're living in an age before 'directories' were invented - or before databases had 'indexes' and 'queries' - and we have to manually write down and key in raw sector numbers every time we open a file. And we're okay with that, because we think - and teach - that that's 'just how computers work'. We've accepted that there's a whole class of things our computers can't do 'because there's no application to do that'.

Something is wrong with this picture.