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."
RDF a load of crap (Score:4, Insightful)
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, 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:4, Insightful)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:This is the future of the web (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:The question is not about a browser (Score:1, Insightful)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?art