Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser 189
Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser?
The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."
Semantic Web Firefox plugin? (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this funny? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people marking this Funny just to be cruel? I find this rather interesting. XUL's data model is RDF already, so it's not like Firefox doesn't already have the foundation to do this.
Re:Why is this funny? (Score:3, Interesting)
All this talk about GBrowser (Google's browser), for instance.... what do you think it is going to be based on? Firefox, of course! You don't think Google would be crazy not to make use of that powerful, flexible, extensible platform that runs on all major operating systems, has support of geeks and hackers to the point where they contribute $250K for The New York Times advert.
RDF in Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
I would say that XUL [xulplanet.com] is more like HTML [w3.org] than RDF [w3.org]. However, you're right that Mozilla's framework has built-in support for querying RDF datastores [xulplanet.com] (although primitive compared with Jena or Redland). In fact Mozilla internally represents bookmarks through RDF [xulplanet.com] even though they are serialized in a pseudo-html syntax on disk (for compatibility reasons). The history, extension registry, and file system are also RDF-based. Mozilla may very well be the most widely distributed framework for accessing RDF datastores on the planet!
Re:RDF in Mozilla (Score:2)
Re:RDF in Mozilla (Score:2)
Re:Semantic Web Firefox plugin? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Semantic Web Firefox plugin? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Semantic Web Firefox plugin? (Score:2)
The question is not about a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess of string and you couldn't realistically get any enjoyment out of the book. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get more information about something, it is easy to go to an outside source to look it up. It does not need to be easier, because by making it easier than it must be you necessarily end up cluttering the thing you want to illuminate.
There is an old saw, "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness. The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to the uselessness of such an over-engineered web space.
The question is not about a browser-Paradigm (Score:2, Informative)
Or a testament to people's inability to understand new paradigms.
Re:The question is not about a browser-Paradigm (Score:5, Interesting)
Or a testament of the inability of the paradigm's creator to get people to understand it's necessity.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Insightful)
so.. invisible strings that you can see if you wish.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2, Insightful)
Your main objection lies in that it does not filter information, but adds to the mass information overload humans experience daily. However, this can be changed simply. Welkin seems to dump all data at once. The code could be changed so you could traverse ideas. I can already see the usefulness of such a thing for educational purposes.
The lack of content on the Semantic Web is a testament to its current lack of usefulness. If there was more content on it, it would be inherently more useful.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Insightful)
- And how is the meaning behind a string of characters given? For example, lets say you want to give the meaning behind a strong of characters that describes to a human the proof of Skolem's Paradox.
It's given by marking it up. The computer doesn't need to know anything about the proof of anything, just like Google doesn't know anything about porn, and yet when you search for "big boobs", it knows what to return. *wink*The point isn't that a computer program will ever "know" what Skolem's paradox is, in the same way a human would "know" what it is. The semantic web isn't about building artificial intelligence into computers, but rather adding knowledge statements to information.
If you tell a computer than Einstein is a scientist, that Einstein is a German, that Einstein won the Nobel prize in physics in 1921 and that this is an image of Einstein [uni-paderborn.de], then a computer will be able to infer that this picture is of a German scientist [slashdot.org].
Based on this information, I could ask the computer for pictures of all the other German scientists who were awarded the Nobel prize in 1921, or some other time. Clearly the computer doesn't need to know about nationalities, or dates, or to understand pictures.
There are simpler use cases, too. Say there's a product called Paradox (well, there used to be one). People searching for just the word "paradox" might get matches for pages about "Skolem's paradox". But if the pages were appropriately marked up, Google (or whatever) could ask you whether you meant a specific paradox, just the way Google currently asks if you perhaps meant something else [google.com].
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Insightful)
RDF and the semantic web assume an ideal situation in which all information is complete and formatted in a uniform way.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Exactly - and while it seems like a worthwhile mental exercise, I would like to point out that this kind of construction has an immense potential for controlling information and shaping people's opinions. Just imagine advertisers getting their foot in somewhere in this; suddenly the machine's 'understanding' is coloured by commercial or political interests.
No, give me the raw information any time, and I'll do the understanding myself, if you don't mind.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Insightful)
The semantic web isn't about human usability. It's about building machine intelligence and knowledge.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, but the problem is if it's unusable for humans to _create_ that content, or to map it from human knowledge-space into machine-parseable format, then it doesn't matter if it's well-engineered from the machine's perspective. That's why adoption of the semantic web has been so poor (outside of applications that could just as well be filled with any ole' XML dialect, like RSS or RDF descriptors used to package Firefox extensions, and so on).
Nobody wants to hire a team of ontological engineers to map information they already have in human accessible form into some highly structured, machine parseable format, and pay them to keep that information up-to-date. Mind you, companies only started paying people to put stuff up on the web when it became clear there was demand, and the early adopters of the web were individuals and academics, but the web was accessible from day one - I put up my first personal web page when I was 15 years old or so, and it took me about an hour to figure out how to do it.
Also remember that big companies spend tens of millions of dollars hacking together some HTML for their website. Imagine how much they would have to pay to get people smart enough to construct ontologies and RDF data versions of all of their content. Yowsers!
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:5, Funny)
Please don't tell that to the company I'm interviewing with on Friday.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Plenty do, in fact. But much more useful is to automate the process. Most useful forms of data storage have a lot of structure which can be automatically converted to RDF constraints.
There goes those AI-types. (Score:2, Troll)
The "Semantic web" is the latest snake oil being pawned by the AI community.
Nothing is worse than an AI-type. They make big claims and never deliver. They overly anthropomorphize all aspects of computation, fooling themselves into a false understanding of all that is related to computer science. For example, Emacs is "intelligent" because it includes a broken implementation of the lambda-calculus, an implementation that doesn't even properly implement beta-reduction? Since when has breadth-first search, depth-first search, and other search algorithms had anything to do with intelligence? They are just procedures for solving problems. The list goes on and on...
These people regularly try to disprove things such as the undecidability of various problems, the incompleteness of various logics, etc... as these undeniable mathematical proofs point to the fact that computers cannot be intelligent. Sure it is fun for sci-fi movies, but it surely isn't real science.
The semantic web is nothing more than AI-types recycling their same old crap. RDF and OWL, the two most popular scripting languages for the semantic web, are just "semantic nets", an AI concept from the 1970s, rehashed. Yup, when you can't sell any snake oil, just rename it to something else and profit... and profit they do, but does society ever see the AI-types' promises come to fruition?
Give me a break! Give the world a break. Computer science is just that: a science, and so the pseudoscience that is AI must be addressed by more people in the field of computer science.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Furthermore, computers are a very restricted form of physical system, and therefore they are limited. There are problems that are not computable, yet humans solve them on a regular basis. Even though many people like to anthropomorphize aspects of computation, there is very little in common between a human and a computer.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
I think it's a bit too early yet to criticise the field of AI for not being scientific. Remember, we humans messed around with electricity for about 70 years before we even found a use for it, let alone understood what caused it. We need to explore, daydream, and play around for a bit before we can get down to some serious science. And, by "a bit," I mean around 50 more years.
And we don't even have powerful enough computers yet to play with. It's kind of like criticising blacksmiths for not having a systematic way to create a 747.
Uh, yeah. That's why the problem is so hard.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Yup, Turing Award winner AI man says it himself. In his speech he basically displays all that there is to this type of person and their psuedoscience.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:3)
You're saying to the blacksmith, "HAHA! You haven't made a 747 yet!"
Blacksmith says, "I don't have the proper tools. Maybe if I had a better hammer..."
You: "You blacksmiths always say that. HAHA! You'll never make it!"
Eventually a 747 was made. I'll bet, if you'd been around then, you would have criticised the airplane makers every step of the way...
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
But here's the thing, if I was saying this to a blacksmith in 500AD (a point where blacksmithing had been around for so long as to seem forever) and asked him to create a 747 he would still be whinning about bad tools for well over another millenium. This is the difference between AI bullshit and the rest of the world ... yes, you might be able to do it in another 1000 years, but so what it might as well be physically impossible as far as planning for it now.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
The assertion that the point of AI research is to build a sentient computer just shows your lack of knowledge of the field.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
I'm not trying to argue, I'm really curious.
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Re:There goes those AI-types. (Score:2)
Anyway, just because a painter claims to be researching AI, doesn't make his paintings a product of the field of AI, the same goes for wannabe mathematicians, programming language designers, etc.
If there is a pure research wing of CS, it would be mathematics. See metamathematics, proof theory, and number theory for good examples. At its best, the field of AI has simply reinvented mathematical concepts from formal logic (semantics nets... oops, they are a fragment of FOL) to lambda-calculi (lisp... oops, we just reinvented the wheel known as the lambda-calculus).
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:3)
Imagine you are a reading a book, but each word is connected by string to a dictionary reference, and each dictionary reference definition is tied to the definitions of the words in the definition. You'd end up with a huge, eventually circular mess
Although your concerns about user interface are well-taken, you seem to be thinking about this strictly in terms of hyperlinks as presented by web browsers, which is a rather limited view. Behaviors could be user-defined, hidden, and abstracted in virtually endless ways.
For example, even now double-clicking any word in the Opera web browser activates a context-sensitive menu with such options as Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Search, Translate, etc.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
While your description of this is quite unflattering, i think it would be useful to have the ability to say--highlight a word or phase and by right clicking on it--get the option of:encyclopedia lookup, dictionary, thesarus, etc. I believe in my context, that could be extremely useful.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
You could always have your own private dictionary of words that you wanted hyperlinked whenever possible, and also an ignore list for the most popular words. But things would get tricky for movie titles which are wordplay on some other concept.
I agree[1] with this persons[ibid.] statement[2,3] (Score:2)
Ever read Infinite Jest (or anything else) by David Foster Wallace? QED
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Like that, no. Though we do need meta data and a browser or search engine to support that meta data.
Not for the current popular stuff that's out there -- the web browsers and search engines work well enough for that.
Where meta data and ways to search it is interesting is in media files such as audio, video, and images. This isn't like a book search in a card catalog, though. Transient stuff such as audio blogs covered by RSS with enclosures (Podcasting) would need to be indexed. Currently, a standard search engine would be a week or two behind this media -- making it much less valuable.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
You're Missing the Point (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
I believe that the "old saw" actually comes from Albert Einstein who said Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
The Semantic Web, while an interesting idea, tries to make things too easy, beyond the point of usefulness.I don't believe that is what Albert Einstein intended. I believe that what he was saying was, when modeling the world, make the model as simple as you can without introducing inacuracy due to an over simplified model.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:2)
And as others have noted, your argument is simply against intrusive display of links.
Regardless, that's not what the Semantic Web is about. Its concern is presenting data in such a form that machines can reason about it and perform useful services for users. This is not really AI (which is good, since AI is impossible): it's just intelligent description of data. Done right, an RDF engine could perform such tasks as 'find the cheapest trip to Memphis from Denver next week, with three to four nights and a luxury car' without needing to know anything about trips, Memphis, Denver, hotels, cars, taxes or aught else--that information would be made available in the Semantic Web, and the engine would simply perform its reasoning.
It's uncertain if this would work or not, but it's a valiant effort.
Solution space? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Solution space? (Score:2)
Re:Solution space? (Score:2)
RDF a load of crap (Score:4, Insightful)
RDF a load of crap-Says an AC. (Score:3, Insightful)
Read this.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pracrdf/index.html
Maybe you'll learn something.
BZZZT, RDF is past sell-by date already (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BZZZT, RDF is past sell-by date already (Score:2)
Re:RDF a load of crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Much work on the semantic web has been with n3 [w3.org]
N3 is a superset of rdf, allowing for quoting of groups of triples (known a formulae). In n3, you can say things about groups of n3 triples, including about their trustworthiness.
For instance, you can say:essentially saying that the formula which is the semantics of the given document if of a class
There are many who are very wary on n3 for precisely the same reasons.
Note that I will always plug n3, given that I'm heavily involved with cwm [w3.org].
Who verifies the third tag? (Score:2)
Gee thanks... (Score:5, Insightful)
A network of random connections of semantic concepts embodied as URIs is just not a friendly form of data for humans to manipulate directly, and I don't think it every will be. That's right, I don't believe this is really an issue that's solvable with slightly better tools. I think ultimately the management of and connection of ontologies is something that computers will have to learn to do themselves.
It's just too hard to expect normal human beings to describe knowledge in any way other than the way we are used to. The web is only as popular as it is because HTML is a simple, appearance-based way to markup documents (yes, I realize strictly speaking HTML isn't supposed to describe many aspects of appearance per se, but there's no denying that it comes from that root). We understand bold and italics (and even strong and em), but ask somebody to generate two concepts by constructing URIs for them and relating them in subject-predicate form and they are going to look at you and drool.
Even programmers aren't used to the idea of describing knowledge - it's one thing to tell a computer what to do, it's another thing to tell a computer how to know about something that you know.
Alright, I know I'm opening myself up to the flames here, so flame away. Anyway, I think the "semantic web" will need to wait for tools like Cyc et. al. to come along far enough to construct and relate their own ontologies out of English text, and until then all we will see is stuff like RSS or RDF files in Firefox extensions to describe deployment conditions (i.e. stuff that can be done with any arbitrary XML dialect that doesn't really qualify as the "semantic web" to me).
Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:1, Interesting)
Yea. Just try getting a programmer to explain the latest thing they're working on. "Well you see it does this, and if you click on that, something happens. It's all too complicated to explain, sorry."
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
Of course programmers are very good at being precise in describing algorithms, but describing knowledge in subject-verb-object format is not so easy. You can't just describe your algorithm, you have to relate each of the base concepts used in the algorithm to existing ontologies, or create your own ontologies for them. Describing an algorithm in pseudocode, or in a structured language with straightforward syntactic rules is relatively easy. Doing the same using RDF is HARD because you aren't just implementing the algorithm, you are describing to a computer what the algorithm does and how to use it.
I encourage you to try working with some of the semantic web technologies a little bit and form your own opinions, as I have done (admittedly 1.5-2 years back, so things may have come along a bit since then, but I doubt the fundamentals have changed).
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
Everything breaks down to subject-verb-object tuples. RDF is supposed to be general enough to describe, well, any and all knowledge.
So you could imagine a description of RSA in RDF pseudo-code:
p-isA-prime
q-isA-prime
n-hasfactor-p
n-hasf
n-numfactors-2
phi-hasfactor-(p-1)
phi-
phi-numfactors-2
e-greaterthan-1
e-lessthan-phi
e-isRelativelyPrime-phi
and so on.
Obviously, all my RDF verbs then need to be defined - in other words, I need a basic ontology for some functions. But, yes, it's possible to describe an algorithm in RDF in a way that would theoretically allow an RDF parser to make inferences about it, or to execute the algorithm, given a sufficient understanding of the ontology.
It's just a somewhat awkward way to go about describing an algorithm, and quite time consuming.
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
And theoretically (very theoretically), our algorithm in a generic RDF description could be used by a sufficiently sophisticated RDF parser to autogenerate source code in a real programming language that it "understood", like C++.
Whether the benefits you get from being able to do this stuff in theory are worth the massive up front effort involved in RDF-izing enough knowledge to be useful is the real question.
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
You do realize that there are computability issues that would prevent such automatic programming?
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
1940s: "It is just around the corner."
1970s: "We just need more links in our semantic nets."
1980s: "We just need more facts input into our expert system."
early 1990 Turing Award winner for AI: "We just need more processing power. All we need is a giga-PC."
2000s: "We just need more data in RDF."
Re:Gee thanks...-Bic Lighters and natives. (Score:2)
No, I'm not away. Please elucidate. You can write invalid programs in any language, or metalanguage, and it's impossible to validate that the program that your code generator generates will halt or not, obviously.
I am not saying it is a practical application, all I'm saying is you can in theory go from an XML-ish algorithmic description to a functional piece of software, so you can clearly do the same with RDF, just more awkwardly (see XUL, for an example of an XML system that has a straightforward mapping to GUI code in several programming languages).
You'd have to be crazy to actually want to program like this using RDF, as I said, and I'm not defending the semantic web, just explaining it since I interpreted your original questions to be genuine. If you're looking for a semantic web fanboy to bash, you're looking in the wrong place.
This is a common claim used by proponents of AI.
No, not at all. I wasn't suggesting that the system becomes self-aware or does anything magical at all. I said there are some theoretical benefits, which seem modest, but there is a massive upfront cost, and it doesn't seem like the benefits are worth the effort (which is presumably why nobody has really adopted the semantic web stuff outside of academia).
As for your skepticism about AI in general, I think it's a bit misplaced. Much of what the previous generation considered AI becomes part of the standard repertoire of computer algorithms. I've used several algorithms dredged out of old AI papers for real-world problems (such as Charles Forgy's Rete nets). The thing is it's laughable to think that these algorithms have anything to do with real "artificial intelligence".
AI is merely a discipline withing computer science devoted to solving problems with computers that are usually solved by humans, and that aren't naturally suited to the computational regime of computers. To say that somebody is a "proponent" of AI presumably implies something about their belief in the possibility of strong AI in the near-term future, and I never said anything of the sort.
Re:Gee thanks... (Score:1)
Re:Gee thanks... (Score:1)
Re:Gee thanks... (Score:3, Informative)
1) I never said anything of the sort. RDF/Semantic Web technologies have nothing to do with inserting links into HTML.
2) I never said it was a replacement for HTML. I just said it wasn't likely to be adopted because of the difficultly of creating content in a properly structured, ontologically connected RDF format.
Of course your secretary isn't supposed to hand-edit RDF files, but somebody has to not only write code that dumps stuff from a database into RDF (easy - not really any different from dumping into any ole' XML format) but map all the stuff into relevant ontologies (not easy), where "easy" is defined in terms of being comprehensible enough to permit adoption outside of academia.
3) It's only easier for two corporations to merge databases if all the entities therein are connected by direct or indirect ontological relationships. People have to build these relationships. That was the whole point of my post.
4) I said nothing about URIs being associated with viewable web pages. Stop inserting random straw man attacks.
Apparently you are the one who needs to RTFM instead of getting up on your high horse there, buddy. Not everybody on Slashdot is as ignorant as you presume.
RDF browser? (Score:3, Funny)
On a Mac (Score:1)
Just something friendly about that.
It's Java Swing (Score:2)
Welkin.java [mit.edu]
Do you really want web pages that look like this? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Do you really want web pages that look like thi (Score:2)
Re:Do you really want web pages that look like thi (Score:2)
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (Score:4, Funny)
Make it the goal of next years International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
I'm sure we'll get a really cryptic one liner that actually is a fully functional RDF browser.
This is the future of the web (Score:5, Informative)
With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.
The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr [flickr.com] (photo blogging) and del.icio.us [del.icio.us] (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics [moloko.itc.it] like Slashdot's own distributed moderation [umich.edu] (PDF) or Advogato [advogato.org].
Lets compare business plans (Score:2)
DJIA/NASDAQ traded firms specializing at least partly in statistical recognition of text as a business model:
GOOG,YHOO,MSFT etc etc
DJIA/NASDAQ firms using metadata as a business model:
When is the future supposed to arrive again?
AI folks are doing the EXACT OPPOSITE (Score:2)
This business isn't vaporware.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think eventSherpa is pretty neat.
(Disclaimer: I know the CEO.)
Seriously now (Score:2, Funny)
but does it... (Score:1)
j/k
CB
innovative? (Score:1, Funny)
screen shot reminds me of my big college sophomore year project. Connecting lots of pretty lines together in hopes of impressing people by calling it a neural network. I have to give props though for getting the lines to be anti-aliased.
The wrong answer to the right question (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble is that RDF (and OWL) try to do too much, getting all tangled up in the arcana of knowledge representation, and the Semantic Web thing has only muddied the waters further -- the screenshot is a stunning graphic representation of the mess that RDF has gotten itself into (I'll assume that it's serious, since it's a long time until 1 April).
All we really need for a data web is a bunch of XML files online that make references to each other for machines to follow, the same way that web pages make links -- in other words, a data web would be a distributed database, the same way that the document web is a distributed hypertext system. RDF reminds me more of the complex pre-HTML hypertext systems of the late 1980s than of the successful, simple formats and protocols that drive the Web.
More like answer to a question no one asked (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:More like answer to a question no one asked (Score:2)
Google can be considered passive statistical text analysis. What we now need is an active way for machines to determine the value of documents and their context.
Re:The wrong answer to the right question (Score:3, Interesting)
It does seem to me that the key thing is to promote ad-hoc use of a relatively standardized mechanism for relating XML document structures to other XML document structures. Forget about waiting for somebody else to build relevant ontologies, reconstructing the entirety of human knowledge from the ground up, or any of that stuff. What people could reasonably do today is relate XML schema one to XML schema two because they need to connect widget A with widget B. Make the adoption of this technology as low cost as possible.
Just like adding a few anchor tags to a basic HTML document is an easy way to relate some human readable information to other human readable information, relating XML document types to other XML document types should be "easy".
Then the only big problem is to find a few applications that would actually demonstrate the benefits of doing this clearly. Yes, it is effectively a distributed XML database of sorts, but what is it good for? RSS has real applications for end users, so it has caught on. Without some software to demonstrate the benefits of linking up your XML data structures, people just won't bother with it. It seems specific, realistic use cases are what's needed here (and what seems terribly lacking from all the W3C RDF documentation as well). How does the distributed, semi-structured database that results provide use to me beyond what I have now with lots of disparate XML documents out there, when you cut out the truly grandiose notions behind RDF and the full-fledged semantic web?
I'm too tired to come up with convincing arguments right now, so hopefully somebody else will fill in the blanks here.
Narcissism (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a wiki. It's not a new way to see metadata. It's your softwares' version of the WWW.
It's not always about you humans.
The semantic web, in a nutshell (Score:5, Funny)
2) some people like to look at pictures of naked girls while masturbating.
3) some people like to think about graph theory while masturbating.
The semantic web is the unfortunate result of #3.
Now, while I have no problem with any of these behaviors, I do ask that people in group #2 to keep their sticky dirty magazines under their bed, not on their coffee tables; and people in group #3 to likewise keep their inventions locked in the closet, and not release them to standards bodies or working groups.
So when you see someone in a clear frenzy of sexual excitement talking to you about "ontologies" and "reification", simply smile politely, and call the police.
Remember, these people are the exception, not the norm, in an otherwise healthy society.
Visualization conundrum (Score:2, Interesting)
One trouble regarding many semantic visualization techniques involving large datasets is: the more visually appealing a graph is rendered, the less useful it often becomes. Many projects undertaken over the past 6 years (including Welkin) have focused on 2- and 3-dimensional renderings of a dataspace, using lines, proximity, node-shape, fly-over metadata display, etc. to classify and relate nodes, only to find there is no room left for persistent display of the textual metadata that ultimately drives a user toward the content he/she is looking for.
Marcos Weskamp's Newsmap [marumushi.com] (slashdot [slashdot.org]) on the other hand demonstrates an excellent balance of form and function, emphasizing textual metadata over symbolic graphic representation. How might this approach be applied specifically to RDF? One possibility: 5 axes rendered in a 2d visual space: color (category), saturation (relevance), size (interest), x/y position (age) and text (metadata). Just a thought anyway.
Awesome, thanks! (Score:2)
Too bad it doesn't take the XUL rules into consideration when redering maps like the one shown in the screenshot. Do you know if they are going to open development up anytime soon?
Dont let poor presentation fool you. (Score:2, Insightful)
People who look at these browser screenshots and decide that the semantic web is/will be a mess stop thinking too early.
This graph-like presentation is just one way to show semantics, and it only works for certain things, like topic maps.
I'm sometimes using tools like outliners and the Brain [thebrain.com] (insert pun here) to present ideas and their relationships. This is not the way you would want to e.g. read/present a complex manual.
Other, more complex forms of presentation are required - and possible. Ted Nelson had a lot of ideas regarding hypertext and presentation of relationships that have never turned into products. I'm working on my own little, Xanadu-ish project that aims to make navigation in structured text easier. The benefit is not presentation "A" or "B" - but the fact that you will be able to tweak the presentation according to what you need to know. This requires semantics, which in turn requires new tools both for the author, not (only) for the reader.
One day, we will look back and wonder how we could live with an Internet where a search engine had to guess if we are looking for Lotus The Car or Lotus The Flower or Lotus The Software Company, or where separating articles by an author from those about him was nearly impossible. No-one in their right mind can claim this is good enough for the future.
Nobody Wants This. (Score:2)
Here's the biggest problem with the web. Most people that have web sites have them to sell stuff, and they DON'T WANT their stuff to be easily searchable and diced and sliced. All this interoperability and data exchange stuff XML, Web Services, Internet Tools, even old COM Objects and CORBA objects and even older RPC all failed, has failed, and will always fail because people don't want you to make it easy to compare you against someone else. It's not a question of cost.
It's just stupid to do it. What, I'm going to pay someone to make it easier for customers to choose someone else for any product? That's the most retarded thing in the world.
If you wanted to make the next big web, make one where people CAN'T compare content from your site to someone elses and have zones of it be franchized off for exclusivity. Like, I'd make a browser where every page sent is just a giant bitmap, and that way, it couldn't be scraped at all.
Re:Buggy!!!! (Score:1)