Re: EE Times - Sony lab tips 'emergent semantics' to make sense of Web

I saw this (or a version of it), and had two leading thoughts:

1. The new technology was presented as a competitor to the Semantic Web 
technologies, in a way which suggests to me a mistaken (or, at least, very 
narrow) view of what Semantic Web technology is about.  To my view, a 
system that can perform automatic ontology extraction/generation is a 
natural complement to the W3C raft of technologies (if it works).  There's 
nothing in OWL and RDF, for example, that demands that application 
developers do ontological markup by hand, or that such information be 
embedded into all data sources.  I quite frequently stumble across projects 
to interpret existing data sources/formats as RDF (e.g. the calendaring 
task force work to interpret iCalendar data,  various proposals to present 
relational database information as RDF, etc.).

2. Sony's new technology has apparently just been patented.  Which I think 
kills it dead in the water as a potential replacement for RDF, OWL and 
friends.  The level of fundamental infrastructure needs to be completely 
free and open to survive as such, IMO.

#g
--

At 10:23 05/11/04 +0100, Arjohn Kampman wrote:

>Someone just notified me of the following article on EE Times:
>
>http://www.eetimes.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51201131
>
>"As the World Wide Web Consortium hammers out specifications on how to
>recode the databases of the world so that natural-language queries can
>be intelligently answered online, Sony Corp. says it has found a better
>way."
>
>Don't know what to think of this article. Is it for real? Comments,
>anyone?
>
>Arjohn
>
>--
>arjohn.kampman@aduna.biz
>Aduna BV - http://aduna.biz/
>Prinses Julianaplein 14-b, 3817 CS Amersfoort, The Netherlands
>tel. +31-(0)33-4659987  fax. +31-(0)33-4659987

------------
Graham Klyne
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Received on Friday, 5 November 2004 10:37:12 UTC