Re: web to semantic web : an automated approach

I've always been a member of the pragmatics-camp, scepticism helps  
indeed, but it doesn't help to get forward.

I think the idea of a global "Semantic Web" was, and still is tempting  
and many bloggers, columnists, and many smart and visionary people  
like to talk about web-scale reasoning. Some even said, the SW will  
replace the traditional Web, or the Web 2.0... This is soo stupid. The  
most important thing to me is the SW standards, the layer cake. The  
possibility to share and interlink information where it's appropriate,  
it's just about an open standard for data.

The last 10 years everybody was talking about open protocols and Web  
services. But what's actually communicated between endpoints is data.  
XML/XML-Schema won't be replaced either. But if you want to interlink  
data on the Web, it's not feasible. This is where SW standards rule.

Because SW research is an open and democratic process, there are so  
many different viewpoints and interpretations about what it is itself.  
Many have stopped using ontologies and reasoners at all, they just use  
RDF and maybe RDF-S, even Ora Lassila - co-author of the original  
Scientific American article in 2001 [1] - as far as I know. Beside  
subsumption based on class hierachies, it's probably not working for  
all-day-information, but it works very very well for many applications  
mainly coming from live sciences. This is what Web 2.0 people and all  
those sceptical about reasoning usually don't see! They see blogs,  
foaf, vcards, etc. Here the possiblity for RDF-only interlinking is  
great and I'm sure it will be successfull and I'm sure that other CMS  
beside Drupal have and will adopt soon and introduce RDF features!

Nobody will ever demand for 100% of all information on the Web being  
RDFized... think pragmatic!

Regards,
AndyL

[1] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web


On Oct 20, 2008, at 12:12 PM, रविंदर ठाकुर  
(ravinder thakur) wrote:

> >>>>This is indeed an essential point in the development of the  
> Semantic Web. I'm
> >>>>mostly in the "it'll happen" camp with regards to people  
> creating semantic
> >>>> content. There are two main sources, one is that they say that  
> 70% of the
> >>>> data on the web is allready in some structured form, thus  
> what's needed is to
> >>>> clarify what that structure means.
>
> I have been in "it will happen" camp but nothing far reaching seems  
> to be happening so i am out. I would say that most of the data (90%)  
> of data out there is unstructured. Also most of the strucutred data  
> is specific to companies and they wont share it. There are people  
> writing blogs, wikipedia, news websites producing content  
> continuisley, people reviewing the products, putting their opinions  
> online, the list of unstructured data is endless and will continue  
> to grow with increasing Internet peneratration in 3rd world  
> conturies. To assume that all users will manually convert this data  
> to sturcutred seems too far fetched. To assume that the information  
> being put by these end users is of little uses than say wikipedia/ 
> dbpedia would be a horrible mistake. Even if we have large data,  
> someone needs to club this vast amount of rdf/owl data and create a  
> global graph interlinking all of that.(BTW i see some serious  
> ontology issues anyone will likely to hit in this approach)
>
> >>>>Also, I think IBM's SUKI http://www.research.ibm.com/UIMA/SUKI/  
> might be of
> >>>>interest.
>
> I have used UIMA but its not a one man army's job. Its just a  
> framework and there is hell lot of things to be done yet on this.  
> eg. write domain specific components etc.
>
>
>
> >>>>A3 is cumbersome and may produce wrong links and information - a  
> nightmare without implicit support for provenance. In corporate  
> >>>>environments A3 is already very popular, but in the broader Web- 
> scale I'm a bit sceptical this will work well. What do you tink?
>
> I am hoping a lot on the progress we have made in NLP and no doubt  
> NLP will continue to improve its performance in the near future.  
> Currently to aliviate the wrong linking/information problem I think  
> reduancy of information will play an important role. If we have 10  
> sources of same peice of information and 6 NLP parsers give one view  
> and rest 4 give other view, i am pretty sure the one on which 6 are  
> agreeing will be the right one. Also we dont have to be 100%  
> right(that too in the begining) since ( other than your boss :) )  
> nobody is 100% right:)
>
>
> >>>>Some CMS like Drupal have already understood this and are  
> rapidly moving towards exposing their content as RDF data
>
> Here's the problem. Drupal are exposing _the data stored in Drupal.  
> Do we expect everyone on web to use Drupal ? No. What happens to  
> information on times.com, blogspot.com, googlegroups.com or  
> kashmirtimes.com ? Semantic web is not about converting someone's  
> data and exposing it with semantic view. Its about the _whole_ data  
> out there on web and then building a web of semantic links on top of  
> that and then doing reasoning on top of that etc.
>
>
> Thanks for initiating the discussion anyways. Keep it coming :)



Web of Data Practitioners Days / Oct 22-23 / Vienna
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Dipl.-Ing.(FH) Andreas Langegger
Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing
Johannes Kepler University Linz
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