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the Semantic Web

  
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:05 / 18.02.02
apologies if this has been done to death, but i'm techno-illeterate.

Been reading this article on the the Semantic Web- a model for the www that makes the *content* meaningful to the computers that are running it, rather than content being irrelevant and aimed only at the human user. Am fascinated by this, what do other people think?

(bear in mind i have no context so feel free to instruct me in the ABCs)
 
 
grant
15:52 / 18.02.02
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present.

The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality. The power of a hypertext link is that "anything can link to anything." Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on. Information varies along many axes. One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV commercial to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.

I'm cautious of any revolution that requires me to make myself comprehensible to any machines.
 
 
captain piss
14:46 / 28.02.04
I get the impression this is starting to happen now –in the last six months there seems to have been a fair bit of coverage in the tech press to that effect.

One of the first applications has been in the blogging sphere - this friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) facility. I think the basic idea of FOAF is that people store information about themselves – geographical location, interests, who their other friends are, and the like – which is “machine-readable”. It then becomes possible to put forward requests like “show me pictures of Webloggers who like the Jesus & Mary Chain and live in Nebraska” or whatever. It’s also suggested that it could be used for dating and match-making, to identify compatible people or, even more dodgily and stalker-ishly, for identifying people in pubs that you could chat up – perhaps assuming a fair number of people have palmtop PCs with 802.11 wireless and FOAF software on it.
This idea of the semantic web is a tricky one to grasp, in some ways, and the implications still seem far from clear, but look potentially very interesting. Why exactly, as grant suggests, should we be eager to make ourselves intelligible to machines? One aspect is just that it makes it much easier to search for things. For instance, searchng for “king mob” might bring up info about the anarchist organisation, the character in the Invisibles and the person who uses the name on Barbelith, when you might only be interested in one of these. If the information on the web was all appropriately tagged and classified, you’d be able to find exactly what you want without relying on a crude association based simply on text.

In the commercial sphere, it seems to be getting lined up as a much more powerful form of database. Rather than storing a load of stuff in a database, you could store it in an “ontology”, a set of logical assertions about specific things and their relationships. For instance, “Barbelith is a web site that includes discussion of magick”, “PersonA is interested in Thelema”, “Thelema is a form of magick”. The software would be able to assert that PersonA might be interested in Barbelith, even though it hasn’t been explicitly spelled out. When your dealing with enormous IT systems or databases, the implications of this are quite far-reaching, saving massive amounts of manpower in creating and modifying databases, for instance.
Also, this basic idea isn’t terribly new (it’s long been the focus of abstruse areas of research like description logic and knowledge representation), but making it work over the web is, and that’s what people seem to be getting excited about.
Don’t know if this is all making sense…But anyway - is anyone using FOAF? What do you reckon about this semantic web business? What could it be used for?
 
 
eeoam
23:14 / 28.02.04
Check this out.
 
 
Tom Coates
22:15 / 29.02.04
The Semantic web as a concept has quite a lot of currency around geek circles that I move in, but to be honest outside those circles it's got kind of a mixed reputation. Obviously one problem is that most people who build websites have no interest in writing semantically comprehensible websites. And - of course - with regards to FOAF, most individual people have shown little or no interest in the creation of FOAF files on their own websites (mostly because most people don't have websites or - at the moment - much interest in getting one). Some of the problems are logical - ie. how to account for differences in language, synonyms and the like.

In the end probably the way this will emerge is that certain chunks of the web, ie. highly visited pages, some commercial offerings, anything that currently has an API will go semantic because it's in their commercial interest to do so. Things will be built around this kind of functionality, but probably not by the likes of you and me, who may receive some of the benefits but are unlikely to contribute much to the project. As such it holds limited interest to me.
 
 
captain piss
11:48 / 02.03.04
Wow- very interesting and funny article, eeoam.
It’s quite convincing on a few fronts and obviously “actual human expression must take into account the ambiguities of the real world”, something that a system of logical assertions - like the semantic web technology - struggles to do.

I guess that kind of fits with what you reckon as well, Tom, that it might not look primed to have a massive impact on the lives of you and me, in the way that many seem to predict. It does seem to be making money for some people already – as an adjunct to corporate database management, mainly.

I’m still struggling to grasp what this is all about – I think some people are priming this kind of technology as an enabler for much lower-level tech stuff, going on in the background with devices like mobile phones, for instance. One of the research areas I’ve been reading about is called “contextual computing” whereby software applications can adapt to suit the context of use.
For instance, someone going into a foreign country will have a roaming function on their phone that will just pick up whoever is that service provider’s partner in that country, even if it’s not the cheapest service. One alternative to this is that the phone could be personalised to give the user more control over this service-selection process, if they want. So the phone could maybe be configured to automatically select service providers on the basis of a personal preference (using an expensive but reliable service for business calls and an economy service for personal calls or whatever). This would use a lot of the semantic web technology, querying data on the web in a way that would require the semantics of the query to be taken into account.
Anyway, not a very exciting example.

This stuff kind of puts me in mind of a cyberpunk-genre SF novel of years gone by (I think ‘Halo’ by Tom Maddox) where people’s lives are shepherded by AIs that kind of lurk around in the background of most personal and business dealings. These are almost the only entities that can grasp the complexities of business and daily life and so are responsible for planning people’s activities and keeping them in the right place at the right time. These AIs also meet each other (in cyberspace obviously) and smoke fags and have conversations about the lives of the people who they work for. The AIs seem to have cool clothes and haircuts and quite involved personas of their own, or at least that’s what starts to happen…quite funny… anyway
 
 
Mirror
17:17 / 05.03.04
I had a small amount of exposure to the Semantic Web indirectly as a result of working on some large government metadata systems (for scientific data, not big-brother intrusive stuff) and it seemed powerful but I had a hard time trying to figure out how to describe our hierarchical metadata standards in RDF.

However, I'm currently working on a little personal project that it now occurs to me should probably be using semantic standards. It's a simple, extensible editing environment designed around how I tend to personally think about data - both hierarchically and with lateral associativity between subtrees. I'm terrible about taking notes as I'm working, mostly because I tend to forget where I filed them, so the first piece I'm working on is just a notepad that has automated metadata creation and a simple lateral link creation syntax, with an autocomplete feature to make creating associations simple.
 
  
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