RE: How will the semantic web emerge

> > I think all of this is way too pie in the sky for the semantic web.
Yes

> I tend to agree with your point here that a lot of what will go on the

To be specific, I was talking about the sorts of real-world applications
we have today, for example those machine-learning approaches which ship
in the box with Oracle, SQL Server, and DB2.

A specific example is the "people who bought items in your cart also
liked..."  Or sites which dynamically select ads based on the types of
content you view or publish.  Sites which recommend ringtones based on
analysis of aggregate behavior of millions of users.

SQL Server shipped for a number of versions with a platform for doing
taxonomy-based English query.  This never really caught broad adoption,
and other vendors found the same.  OTOH, when we started shipping
machine-learning based platform pieces: Bayesian classifiers,
clustering, etc. we found that these were quickly adopted in many
real-world situations.  Google's pagerank is another example of machine
learning applied to real-world problem (collaborative filtering).  You
can find many approached based on machine learning in practical use.
Most approaches based on static, manually maintained taxonomy, are dead.

Received on Saturday, 17 December 2005 23:08:04 UTC