Where is the Semantic Web? Is it too hard, too complicated, too sophisticated, or too unrealistic to achieve? Or do we just need to better understand the Web's history in order to get there?
In 2001, a Scientific American article declared the formation of the Semantic Web research community. The article described the Semantic Web as an extension of the current Web, in which information is given well defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.In the same year, several thinkers such as Dermot McCormack, Dale Dougherty, and Tim O'Reilly began to wonder what the Web would be like after the dotcom crash. Their thoughts eventually led to the concept of Web 2.0.
Now that Web 2.0 has already been a great success and the hype continues, the World Wide Web is undergoing an evolution. Humans are continuously adding more content and services onto the Web that are of better quality. This progressive process of quality upgrade is the fundamental nature of Web evolution.
The purpose of this quality upgrade process is to realize a dream. It is a dream in which all voices are better heard and all thoughts are better presented, a Web that helps more strangers become acquaintances and gives everyone the opportunity to restart a new life. [Ed. note: Cue the violins!]
However, by understanding the Semantic Web as a Web of data and ignoring the human's role in its success, we're drifting from that dream. Even worse, few researchers really know how to fix this problem, which is causing the current delay in implementing the Semantic Web. At present, the academic Semantic Web is nothing more than a toy that only people in the ivory tower know how to play with.
To solve this problem, the most urgent goal is to better understand the Web's evolution. W3C and the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) recognized this at a recent workshop at WWW 2008. Their first Web Evolution Workshop (WEBEVOLVE) states, "There is a growing realization among many researchers that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed." But it is still just a beginning. We must move beyond the understanding of the Semantic Web as only a Web of data.
Unquestionably there will be a Web of data, but it should not be the goal. The objective of the Semantic Web must be directly focused on humans as the most essential factor of the Web. Only after we make this connection will the Semantic Web gain momentum and become a reality.
— Yihong Ding, Semantic Web researcher and blogger
I agree with you that Google is the best among those who are indexing the syntactic Web. But can Google continue its success on the realm of semantics? This is another question.
The difference is as follows:
Syntactic Web: one word, one syntax
Smenatic Web: one word, numerous semantics
Due to this difference, can the strategy executed by Google be efficient in this new situation? It is doubtful. My prediction is that we need new strategies that are different from the one executed by Google at present. There are several startup companies contacted me about the new methodologies. But we are still exploring.
Hi Yihong / Hounhosp. It's a good and interesting discussion. The term "Knowledge organization" somehow reminds me of Google's mission, which is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Indeed, managing the extremely massive amount of info on the Web, which is dynamic and rapidly growing, is one of the greatest challenges in the present era and certainly for the future of the Internet. Surely, Google's not the only one that is taking on the challenge, but in my opinion, it's the leader and probably the most succesful company to ever organize the vast amount of the world's info through its famous search engine, anything from news/blogs, scholarly papers, books, patents and products to maps, images and videos... "an ultimate answer machine".
I can see now what you mean by human factor and human participation. The challenging part I guess is how to give " ordinary users" the technical tools that will allow them "to use various Semantic-Web technologies to accomplish tasks" and make them abide by that instead of relying on the traditional "tagging" we are accustomed to in presenting content. There should be a new way to organise contents posted on the web, be it on conventional sites or a community sites either by a web expert or an ordinary user. Of course, this will require that the few researchers who are working on the semantic web focuss on sensibilizing people rather than "shutting themselves up" in a laboratory. But for now I don't think that they could do anything else as the technical tools are not available yet. The answer may come from "everybody" or "somebody" like you as you sai. Good luck with the "Active Semantic Space". It is a good start.
Viboons has suggested a paradigm, and it is also what I thought before. That is, we need to build something that allows ordinary users to start organizing their knowledge in formal ways. Knowledge organization will be the next big thing about the Web.
If you go back to see my article about Web evolution, you can see that from the beginning I have aruged that we need to figure out some interesting way to encourage people to not only tag, but also organized their tags. In this direction, actually Twine invented by Radar Networks has made the first step. The most valuable contribution that Twine has done is actually not a new service that help bookmark. By contrast, it is the first mainstream product that allows people to organize knowledge in formal ways beyond just bookmarking and tagging. This philosophical advance is more important than the service itself.
One thing I have once suggested in my series of Web evolution is that the combination of internet games with knowledge organization would be an important and valuable thing to do. Game is one of the best ways to engage human participation.
To the end, if we really expect to have the Web more forward to Semantic Web, we need to develop something that is similar to blog with respect to Web 2.0. This something I call it Web-3.0 space. Such a Web-3.0 space will allow ordinary users to use various Semantic-Web technologies to accomplish tasks. I have tried some research towards this goal (such as the Activie Semantic Space). Although this research is only at its very early stage, I believe that it represents the future direction of real-world Semantic-Web achievement.
If I understand your point, the IAs (like a speech recognation software FOR THE WEB) could gradually make sense of the web contents and make accurate decisions about that content's meanings; but for now the current technology cannot help in its implementation (Viboons) and this is because " few reseachers know how to make everybody participate to the Semantic Web construction project" (Yihong). My question to Yihong is: How do you think researchers would have done to make that "human participation" more tangible. Should it be through an open source project or anything else?
Thank you for the comments you have made to this post. I think they are great to lead more thougts to this interesting topic. According to your question about "The realization of Semantic Web must demand the participation of everybody but not somebody", here are more explanations in my mind. Please step into the discussion since I do not mean that my thoughts are absolutely right. As I said, we need "everybody to particiate". ;-)
First of all, hounhosp, when I said that "few researchers know how to fix the problem," what I mean is that few reseachers know how to make everybody participate to the Semantic Web construction project.
Until now, the construction of Semantic Web is limited in a small group of ivory tower researchers. Including W3C, many Semantic Web researchers think that they can build up a Semantic Web by themselves as if they had invented World Wide Web from laboratory. But things have been changed and this time the target is totally different from the previous one, though both of them are "web".
The difference between constructing World Wide Web and constructing Semantic Web is that the former one is a pure technological issue while the latter one is more about a social and philosophical issue.
When we produce World Wide Web, the issues such as network protocols, web document presentation formats, and web function calls are the essential ones to make the goal happen. These issues can only be solved by few well-trained professionals. Ordinary users generally cannot suggest anything and indeed they do not care these detailed technological issues. As long as the final results can work, the users would be satisfied.
The construction of Semantic Web is totally another thing. The center of Semantic Web is not about the technologies such as RDF, OWL, or SPARQL. The center of Semantic Web is about how every individual user can have their understanding properly presented and thus machines can correctly understand their specified meanings.
"Semantics", this term is a very much subjective term in contrast to an objective term. If someone wants to have a Web that is uniformally annotated, few people would be interested in such a Web because the meanings existed are not what they want to see. Only if everybody can annotate everything by his own perspectives, such a Semantic Web becomes meaningful to ordinary users. By this sense, we have to allow and encourage everybody's participation but not somebody's participation. This is the prerequisite to realize the real Semantic Web.
How to make this vision happen in the real world. viboons has already presented a brilliant methodology, and it is also what I have suggested.
first I want to point out that IA's should be able to make decisions or use reasoning like humans but only to some extent, and most will be for relatively simple tasks (i.e. simple for us, but complex for software IA's). In other words, with current technologies, machines' processing capability is nothing compare to that of human brains (this is obviously in terms of intelligence, or otherwise one might wonder why people still use calculators).
Second, the concept of how to design IA's to make decisions, in my opinion, is to design software that can learn and fine-tune itself over time rather than software that is programmed with a set of fixed decision-making rules. At first the software would be able to recognize content very little but it would learn to analyse new data based on the Semantic Web's descriptive technologies and gain more knowledge and experience as it grows, similar to human's learning process. It would make a lot of mistakes at first, but this is where human comes in to help "train up" the software to make corrections. This is like speech recognition software where you often need to train it with your voice, and the more you use the software the better it recognizes what you say. Only the difference is that the Web IA's would be trained to recognizes the Web content and make sense of the data, which the software may apply to perform tasks automatically for human. Obviously, it's not easy to implement this largely due to limitations in technologies, otherwise it would already have happened.
As to Yihong's comment "The realization of Semantic Web must demand the participation of everybody but not somebody", I also have the same question actually. So, it will be interesting to see Yihong elaborates on this.
The issue here I think, is how to design those "super" (IAs) that could make decisions like humans and being able to distinguish between "contents level" on the web. What I don't really understand is when Yihong said that it demands everybody's participation (experts and common users), and at the same time she mentions that "few researchers know how to fix the problem." The concept itself is so confusing that there is no wonder it is not catching up.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Semantic Web isn't an app but the Web that's equipped with "intelligent agents" or IA's that can understand info on the Web, learn and make basic decisions more or less like human users. And as I understand it, the "human factor" here is essentially the need for us humans to train up these Web IA's and hopefully in time they would have enough knowledge and comprehension to be able to perform tasks for humans that require certain level of "intelligence". The idea is like having a Web "bot" that one can program and teach so that it learns how to recognize and make sence of certain info on the Web. But at the start, machines have to be fundamentally designed such that they're capable of learning (both in terms of software and hardware). This may require further development in IA and computer technologies. Meanwhile, all the descriptive technologies, such as XML, RDF and OWL, will help make the Web content more understandable to machines.
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