

Meet Silk, The Semantic Web For The Rest Of Us - salar
http://gigaom.com/europe/meet-silk-the-semantic-web-for-the-rest-of-us/

======
marcusf
So this seems to be about superimposing the relational model on ad-hoc data?
It seems like an idea that has been explored ad infinitum. It also seems like
it's for want of a use case, in its current form.

Like they say in the article, the main issue they'll run in to is that people
really don't want to build taxonomies manually. My skeptic prediction: Unless
they get some really snappy text mining to go with the product, it'll be dead
in the water. When you want to ad-hoc mine certain data sets, it's usually
because you've just figured out you need some specific query answered. Having
to spend several hours structuring the data before you run the actual query
seems about as laborious as just doing the original work yourself. Though I
might be of limited vision, or just missing something fundamental here.

~~~
sander
We basically have 2 approaches to this problem.

When people have existing data with some structure, they can easily convert
this into a semantic Silk site. This can be done using various importer tools
(such as our CSV importer) and via the read/write API.

When people are creating new content, we're trying to make it as easy as
possible to add semantics/tags. It's as easy as making your text bold and we
try to provide instant value to users who tag their content, thereby
encouraging them to keep doing so. Some things we do are: \- converting
currencies \- showing how long ago a date was \- displaying a map for
locations \- showing how data relates to other data (tagging the age of a
person, will show a list of how old other people in the site are)

So, if you have unstructured data and are looking for one quick answer, Silk
may not be the right tool to use. When the data has some structure already,
you can easily convert it into a Silk site and then enjoy some Silk magic. But
ideally, you use Silk to make some specific content available in a structured
manner, so you can use it for a longer period of time.

~~~
marcusf
Ok, very cool. I might misunderstand the use case then.

Do you do any sort of history-based analysis? E.g. solving "I just imported
this, which I tagged with a,b,c from locations x,y,z, now I want to import
this, that has d,e,f also from positions x,y,z" - I guess Wikipedias info
boxes would be a typical example of that kind of semi-structured data. Or does
that require setting up an import channel yourself?

~~~
sander
The <http://world.silkapp.com> site was actually built that way. It's a
combination of information on Wikipedia & the CIA world factbook. We built a
MediaWiki importer for this, that will be publicly available at some point.
Also, some of the functionality may make it to the core product, but we'll
have to see how this develops over time.

Silk does use pattern recognition to automatically infer data types already,
so you won't have to specify that something is a location, date, currency,
number, etc. The editor will find out itself. We are working hard to bring
this kind of 'cleverness' to more and more aspects of the editor.

------
lmm
Seems like they're stuck on the same problems that have always killed the
Semantic Web: manual metadata, and incompatible schemas. Without a solution to
either, this is no different from what we had in 2003.

~~~
sander
Thanks for your remark.

As for manual metadata, see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3953644>

As for incompatible schemas, we're not aiming to build one big ontology for
the world, but we are aiming to facilitate a large number of datasets that are
useful by themselves. We're working towards being able to link various Silk
sites to each other and will try to find ways to make as many as schemas fit
into each other.

------
shabble
not to be confused with Amazon Silk[1], which is the browser offloading to AWS
for kindles.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk>

~~~
morphyn
In the context of the Semantic Web, there is also the Silk Framework [1], a
tool to automatically link related data within different datasets.

[1] <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/>

------
iandanforth
To recap, 'semantics' is the study of meaning. Humans derive meaning from
linguistic symbols by comparing them to their prior experiences. The basic
question being "Has this symbol, or a closely associated symbol, been present
in the context of a memory I have?" If it is, then we 'understand' the symbol
by pulling up the memory or memories tied to it. For most symbols (e.g. apple)
there is a rich personal history or experiences we can compare it to.

So the mapping here is symbol -> experiences, where experiences are the
memories of senses over time.

Thus the data structure that will ultimately _solve_ this problem is one that
performs _that_ mapping, not one which maps symbols to a necessarily arbitrary
and limited other set of symbols (aka category labels and facts).

------
tmcw
Not to be confused with Jason Rohrer's silk, which is an actually creative
solution to a much more core problem, is open-source, and not driven by
venture-capital segway hypewaves: <http://hypertext.sourceforge.net/silk/>

------
motters
This doesn't look like the Semantic Web to me, it looks like a proprietary RDF
silo.

~~~
muyuu
I don't see how else would they monetise it to be honest.

It's one of the main reasons the "semantic web" didn't really catch up back in
the day. Those who are in position to really gather massive amounts of data
won't share it all with the competition (namely Google and Facebook).

------
wordplay
They should have a tutorial that walks me through how to accomplish example
project in the promo video. From what I can tell I would have to import all
those prime minister pages from Wikipedia manually?

PS. I'm very interested in the ideas behind the semantic web, and the video
hints that Silk may have gotten closer than anyone else at successfully
"building the human" into the software design. IMO it's all about removing
friction and I see some promising ideas in that regard, so congrats to Silk
for that!

------
username3
How does Silk compare to Freebase?

~~~
sander
1\. Freebase aims to build one big repository of structured data for all the
information in the world, whereas Silk consists of separate sites with
separate owners.

2\. Datasets in Silk are also common websites. Technically, there is no need
to use the semantic layar of Silk. Admittedly, it's a lot less fun without :)

------
maaku
This sounds exactly like DEVONthink, reframed as "semantic web":

[http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overvie...](http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overview.html)

------
chintan
It is not clear if this is really a Semantic Web app

1\. Does it allow OWL/RDF import/exports? Can I bring in my "linked data"
schemas into Silk?

2\. Is there any ontology reasoning support in search?

~~~
sander
1\. Our read/write API allows you to get any existing data set into Silk. We
have various importers available. No OWL/RDF at this time, but that may very
well be developed by ourselves or our developer eco-system in the future.

2\. Silk has a powerful query engine that allows quite complex reasoning. Part
of that is already exposed in the product, through our search bar and the so
called "explore mode". We have no UI yet for the more complex queries, but
those can be performed through our API.

------
uses
Maybe they could start by importing, categorizing, and structuring the
entirety of Wikipedia. That would be a good tech demo.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Good suggestion. BTW, have you looked at <http://dbpedia.org/About> ? DBPedia
is RDF data extracted from Wikipedia data. There is an interesting and useful
ecosystem built around it.

------
drumdance
How is this different from microformats?

~~~
sander
It's somewhat similar, yet much easier to apply. You don't have to be a
programmer or even look at HTML/code to apply semantics to your content.

