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The Web of Data, Beyond What Google and Yahoo Show
jccq writes "Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. It also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. Here are a screencast and a blog post, with semantic-web-geek details."
and studied at nearby uni,
DERI is a money blackhole, most of the people there know that semantic web has many many issues and probably will never bear fruit, but chose not to speak up in order not to damage their academic careers and keep their cushy "research" positions
The folks at the DERI institute used to have Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query.
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
RDF is nice and there are various different syntaxes for it (including various triples formats), and promises, if it can be built, deployed and trusted(!!!) to make the web ever so much more searchable. This will depend though on people writing good ontologies (not easy) and using them correctly (even less easy).
RDFa and microformats look, on the surface at least, to be nice ways to manage RDF type information in HTML. But I'm a bit more dubious - they don't, in many cases, have careful ontologies built around them - when they do (RDFa, mostly) they seem to be very resource intensive (a heavily RDFa annotated HTML page is likely to balloon to several times the same page without RDFa), and the uses of them I've seen have been less than convincingly correct. This doesn't mean that they're useless, just that they're not doing the job at the moment, or they're doing the job poorly.
The solution that seems to be favored by the semantic web types is to present RDF pages as an alternative to HTML pages when RDF is requested. This looks, by far, to be the best way to work this, but does require site builders (and CMSs and web frameworks), and content authors, to be able to build correct RDF pages that represent the information presented, often at the same time as they present HTML pages to human readers (and non-RDF search engines). This is going to be a major problem.
It was the future in 2001; inspired the masses with its vision of the glorious future in 2003; and of course we are presumably right on the cusp of this golden future today.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't know why but their presentation pisses me off beyond reason.
Probably because it's the n-th time somebody is trying to impose some silly standard.
And pretends it's the best invention since you-know-what.
I have in real life a fairly common name, there's at least 10 of me worldwide, I recognized that they deliberately picked a unique name to show how well it works.
Ach we'll see.
My name brought the sig.ma server to its knees.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Some people have already suggested that common names will cause problems with this system. The next big thing should be searching by context. I hate searching for "supernova" only to get a long list of songs by some band. The keyword "space" or "star" helps, but that usually results in other false hits, too. Don't even get me started on acronyms, or things that don't have anything to do with computer technology.
Would there be any way for a search engine to examine a whole bunch of keywords and content in a page, and learn the difference between the context of music and astronomy? That would be a big help.
---
AI Feed @ Feed Distiller
I gave it my first and last name, and it came up with nothing. Then, I gave it my complete name. It took my middle name (David) added "Baltimore" as a random last name and gave me facts about somebody named David Baltimore. Absolute, utter, meaningless gibberish. I am not impressed.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I have a slightly outdated buzzword bingo card, but I think I have a winner even still. So, hold your cards.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This was exactly my thought watching the video. I'd love to make this my default search engine. However, it doesn't seem to be QUITE there yet. For example, if I search for my name, it throws in people with the same forename, but different surnames. The semantic stuff they've done beyond normal search is GREAT, but they seem to have slacked off a bit on making the plain old search stuff work well enough. Shame, as it would have easily been the successor to google for me otherwise.
Still, I'm definitely going to play with this more, and see if I can get enough mileage out of it. It's not like google doesn't mix in things you didn't ask for I suppose, and part of the fun of the web is finding things you never expected.
the frackin thing doesnt even work. and when you hit the 'Contact' button to yell at the creators of the site for sucking, all you get is an Apache error. Smoooooooooooth.