web to semantic web : an automated approach

Hello friends,

I have been following semantic web for some time now and have seen quite 
a lot of projects being run (dbpedia, FOAF etc) trying to generate some 
semantic content. While these approaches might have been successful in 
their goals, one major problem plaguing semantic web as a whole is the 
lack of semantic content. Unfortunately there is nothing in sight that 
we can rely on to generate semantic content for the truckloads of 
information being put on web everyday. I think one of the _wrong_ 
assumption in semantic web community is that content creators will be 
creating a semantic data which I think is too much for the asking from 
even more technically sound part of web community let along whole of the 
web community. It hasn't happened over last so many years and I don't 
see it happening in the near future.

I think what we need to move the semantic web forward is a mechanism to 
_automatcially_ convert the information over the web to semantic 
information. There are many softwares/services that can be used for this 
purpose. I am currently developing one prototype for this purpose. This 
prototype uses services from OpenCalais(http://www.opencalais.com/) to 
convert ordinary text to semantic form. This service is very limited in 
what entities supports at the moment but its a very good start. I am 
pretty sure there will be many other good options available that might 
be unknown to me. The currently very primitive prototype can be seen at 
http://arcse.appspot.com. This currently implements very few of the 
ideas I have for this. This is hosted on Google's AppEngine so sometime 
gives timeout messages internally so please bear with this :).

This automatic conversion however is not a simple task and needs work in 
lot in domains ranging form NLP to artificial intelligence to semantic 
web to logic etc. So thats why this mail. I will be more than happy if 
we can join together to form a like minded team that can work on solving 
this most important problem plaguing semantic web currently.

Waiting for your suggestions/criticisms
Ravinder Thakur

Received on Monday, 20 October 2008 06:57:15 UTC