

11 Things To Know About Semantic Web - cawel
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_11_things_to_know.php

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henning
Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

I wish he would have gone further and said that if you aren't creating the
future you have no business predicting it.

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iowahansen
One single company could affect a global semantic web adoption within 6
months: Google. Once they decide to give webpages with semantic info a higher
relevance, armies of SEO experts would swiftly generate vast amounts of
semantic information...

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nandan
Excellent point. I guess the challenge is in first determining whether
adopting the strategy to give pages with semantic info a higher rank, a good
one. In other words, will this improve users' satisfaction with search?

I suppose it could start out in Google Labs as an experiment. Although I m
quite convinced of the power of the semantic web, I would think Google would
tread carefully before changing what's working for them, now.

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dualogy
[ Remember, you heard it here first (or tell me where you heard it before :) ]

Without having read the article (yet), my theory is that the web will become
"semantic" in the sense "semaniacs" hope for ONLY when users can generate
structured content (other than just photos, articles, comments, forum posts
etc) EASILY ... that is: differently from when HTML started out, site owners
cannot get such a ball rolling by painstakingly fleshing out RDF mark-up
manually. Rather, those web sites will be "semantic" that provide wiki-like
editing for data sets.

As an example, imagine a web-based database of restaurants: \- Let everyone
provide tags for different categories (taste ie Indian/Italian/Regional, style
ie luxury/fast food joint/middle-of-the-road, features ie garden/bar/smoking
area) \- Let everyone update base facts such as address or name changes \- Let
everyone add photos, media, reviews, comments \- Most importantly: let
everyone rate/confirm/deny everyone elses contributions \- Reward by
credits/trust/rankings but where commerce is involved, also by
discounts/"miles"/whatever.

Make it easy for websites to do that, or create successful websites that do
that so others follow suit should this be what people really want, and you
have a semantic web in no time.

If the semantic web is what people want, this will be the only feasible way to
create one. If it's not what they want, we will find out soon enough.

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dualogy
Okay now I've read the article. The point I was making is their bullet point
11. The only one that I thought mattered in this article.
Enterprise/platform/integration win rather than consumer win? Nope, consumers
decide, they always do...

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anaphoric
Sorry, semantic web = semantic networks a la Quillian. It's a step backward.

RDBMS work because they have a solid semantic foundation with n-ary relations.
Description logic based formalism can't do n-ary, nor can RDF triple stores.
The whole adventure is ill fated and us database weenies knew it from the
start.

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maxwell
<http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-n-aryRelations/> ?

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anaphoric
If you read their description, you can sense that this simple capability is
beyond their grasp. They are falling back on reification and complex syntax.
They even promise more notes soon LOL!

Here is an example I would like to see Semantic Web people treat. No
references to W3C documents, just show us the solution. It's trivial in SQL.

Supplier(supplierId, name,country)

Part(partId, name,price)

Customer(custId,name,country)

Supplies(supplierId,partId,custId)

"Give the American suppliers who supply parts under 10$ to customers in
Japan".

I won't bore you with the SQL solution. Now let's see it in OWL! Good luck!

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mtraven
It's reasonably trivial in RDF/OWL as well; Supplies would be a class whose
instances have statements that point to supplier, part, and customer. In rough
SPARQL that would be something like:

select distinct ?supplier where

?supplies hasSupplier ?supplier

?supplies hasPart ?part

?supplies hasCustomer ?customer

?supplier hasCountry "US"

?customer hasCountry "Japan"

?part hasPrice ?price

filter(?price < 10)

Not that bad, maybe more verbose than SQL, but not that difficult to express.
You'd probably want type constraints on the variables, too.

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anaphoric
OK, you are right, that wasn't so bad. Perhaps I will take a closer look at
SPARQL one of these days.

BTW how does it do with things like spatial constrains. In relational
databases it's easy to express spatial joins over relations. For example given

Structure(id, name, x, y, type)

you can query for things like all the structures of type 'pharmacy' within 1
km of a 'hospital'. It's simple to define functions like distance(x1,y1,x2,y2)
that may be predicated on. Anything like that in SPARQL (yet)?

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darreld
Other than the oft-repeated 'machine readable', I'm having a hard time getting
over the conceptual hump of what the Semantic Web is.

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trevelyan
I work with semantic analysis technology (no, it isn't profitable), and think
this is a really good summary.

The useful applications long-term are in areas like machine translation
(contextual semantic knowledge is important), document categorization and
indexing for search (ie. semantic data-scraping). Indexing for search is the
simplest of the bunch and the most likely use of the tech that we'll see soon.

RWW has it right that the major challenge this poses to Google is a
proliferation of industry specific applications that monetize better
information management by virtue of knowing exactly what their users want and
figuring out creative ways to aggregate it. Google is particularly weak with
multiple languages: their focus on language-agnostic translation tools makes
them vulnerable in foreign markets.

Then again, if Google provides the tools to let these vertical portals manage
their own on-site advertising, who cares who is doing the actual document
indexing/analysis?

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leaf
It's been a really long time since I looked at this kind of stuff in any
detail. The librarians I worked with at university would go on and on about
semantic markup, and there were some very dedicated users that seemed to be
willing to slog through the SGML nightmare. But, as soon as HTML came out it
swamped the other technologies because it was so easy for people.

Has anything changed since the SGML days? Rhetorically, it all still sounds
like a bunch of librarians complaining woefully that they can't do search
properly if no one marks up their data properly.

~~~
trevelyan
Nothing much has changed. Most of the talk about the semantic web is complete
hot air. It isn't as if this stuff is counterintuitive or non-obvious -- it's
just that no-one wants to go through the work of teaching machines to
understand language/text without a way to profit from it.

