University Launches Semantic Web Interface

kv9 writes "The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject."

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[spot35]

The demo says it requires a Mozilla based browser for standard JavaScript compatibility...

mspace.sourceforge.net

[Alien54]

Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] has the 0.4 version of the software

there are plenty of links in the mirrored article [mirrordot.org] to other resources.

Great step forward, but big problem

[kahei]

Hmm, so in this system, there are documents that are annotated with meta-data... and then, you can run a query on that metadata to find documents matching certain criteria. You can narrow down a query, too. So far so ordinary.

The big problem, though, is that it's hard to be sarcastic enough. Business has already provided various document annotating and indexing systems, and various databases in which to store the results, and various query systems with which to retrieve them / report on them. Now, a bunch of students have done the same thing in miniature and to them it's all terribly much more interesting than those grubby real world systems. Great for them -- problem for me.

I mean, power to them and all, but after the first n Big Honkin' Advances In The Semantic Web, the ordinary Joe like me is left really scraping the barrel for ways to be sarcastic about it. It's all been done -- nothing I can offer that hasn't been modded +5 (70% Funny 30% Troll) in a dozen Semantic Web articles in the past. So I give up, okay? I can't keep up. There, I said it.

I hope you're happy now.

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[BristolCream]

So long as the choice is "Should we make our site standards-compliant or IE-compatible?" there can never be a truly universal website.

Rubbish. It's actually very easy to code a site to html standards that also works in IE. it means having to duplicate and target some of your CSS, whcih is additional overhead in terms of testing and download, but it's easilly done.

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[zootm]

The problem is that there's a lot of things that just aren't possible when being both standards compliant and IE compliant - if you look around for CSS examples on the web, you'll often find that they use bugs in IE's comment parsing to fix CSS problems (there's some strings that should be interpreted as comments but aren't in IE, so putting the hack inside such a block works).

dev thoughts

[AlisdairO]

I'm a developer on the project, and the commentry is appreciated. I'm frankly somewhat surprised at the level of hype the project has generated at this stage of the game. While I find the results that you can get with the current implementation very interesting, there's a lot of work yet to do before it's truly revolutionary. With that said, I'd ask you to consider the possiblities offered by expansions to the original idea. We're working on converting the system as a whole to a web service, allowing any kind of client to access the information in a sensical manner, and linking mspaces together. This, for example, would allow you to hook together information on localality and, say, restaurants. You might be looking for restaurants within a certain area of where you are now. Once you get that information, you could select information on those restaurants in a powerful manner - you could select restaurants that offer vegetarian meals and meals containing low carbohydrates and without gluten, for prices under £10.00. With those results, you may decide to further filter it down by selecting only italian or american style meals. Largely, the power behind the existing concept comes with the ability to construct your own dynamic hierarchies. I posted further down about it while forgetting to log in - with a film database, for example, you might find out about russian actors who acted in american films during the mccarthy era. This is the sort of obscure information that people are unlikely to have written extensively about, so collating the information would be difficult. With the system we have, that sort of information is contained within the relationships for you to discover for yourself. For me, a lot of the potential of this idea is contained in the fact that the google is awesome for discovering information on reasonably common things. For more obscure information, what if nobody has written a page about what you want to know? The information is out there, but has never been collated properly. mSpaces can give you that sort of information, without having to explicitly generate it.

mSpace is indeed cutting-edge

[rubberpaw]

The tone of the article is unfortunate. But it's also too bad that really good technology gets dissed by the tech community if it's well marketed. mSpace is a rather sophisticated system for storing and relating arbitrary unstructured information in meaningful ways. The interface doesn't do it full justice.

McGuffin and Schraefel's paper of mSpaces, polyarchies and zzStructures [toronto.edu] won the ACM Hypertext Conference's award for "Special Research Distinction for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts."

Schraefel is not only a good programmer, doing very cutting edge information technology stuff, but she and her team have managed to design a useful piece of software that uses it. Since when can the Academic world do this kind of thing?

*sigh* People diss Nelson when he comes up with incredibly good ideas [eastgate.com] and quality computer science [utoronto.ca]. And now, when people like Schraefel produce a usable product, they get dissed too. Before you go snarking about how the Semantic Web won't come down from heaven and die on a cross for us, make sure you know what the Semantic Web is [ftrain.com]. Just like Harpers, this is a perfectly cool example.

What do I think about the Semantic Web? I will admit, I sometimes wonder if it's safe [tamu.edu].

Downloaded the system - looks interesting

[MarkWatson]

mSpace is a LGPLed project that consists of Javascript utilities to access a 3Store RDF repository (3Store is another open source project).

This project looks very useful if you already have RDF data that you would like to publish. There is a PDF paper (that I have only read the first 10 pages of) that looks good. Anyway, I might use this on a demo that I am (slowly) working on.

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[mc+sd]

This is great to know. When we tested with Opera, the columns laid out properly, but the preview cues behaved poorly - you may not notice this - the audio from each cue did not stop as another one started up, so you get an undesireable polyphony. hence not saying it fully works on anything but moz browsers it *seems* to work on safari as well.

Re:"standard javascript compatibility"

[mc+sd]

Actually you're not the only one. We are too (the mspace team that is). For a research project, our first goal has been to work with standards compliant browsers. Our second goal, pending cycles, will be to get UIs that work on more browsers. Many folks interested in our approach have an installed base of IE users so we need to support those communities. Sorry that you couldn't use your usual browser yet. Thanks for visiting the project, though.

Re:that's the easy part

[mc+sd]

You're right: applying multiple columns across a schema is not hard. however, swapping around and adding in dimensions isn't what you'd call common (have you seen that before?)

As opposed to easy, it's also effective. so why aren't more sites doing this? It's like the mac osx watson tool (RIP).

As for the "hard part", you don't hand code the browser for each domain. The framework lets you through any semantic model at it you want. if you have an ontology so much the better. it is a general browser. the demo is just, well, a demo.

if you look at the report or the papers at the main site, http://mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk, you'll see where that "hard part" is happeneing, in terms of coding, rdf and related.

thanks for taking the time to look at the project.

Re:mSpace isn't cutting-edge

[mc+sd]

We're not actually plopping data into a hierarchy.

if you have an n dimensional space - which music is - how do you represent it so that meaning can be gained from it?

take a projection through an n-d space, flatten it, temporary hierarchies come forth.

that's what's happening with the current view. change the slice/projection by changind that attributes/dimensions selected. new hierarchies, new relationships. what do you think?

and actually in this case we're not using an ontology - tho having one would allow for extra inference. we also believe with minsky in "scruffy works' as opposed to brittleness.

i don't know that we're trying to edge cut so much as explore other ways of exploring information by exposing relationships. it's really about improving access. and making that generally easier to expose in the ui. maybe it doesn't have to bleed or cut just to let folks have an improvement.

for instance, folks we ran trials with went from an experience of "no access" to classical music to one of feeling "great access" to a domain previously experienced as "off limits"

that's a quantum leap for the person wanting the information, don't you think?

as for "absurd marketing hype" thank you for your contribution to it!

Other semantic web browsers/apps

[erikdalen]

I find these projects far more interesting:

Chandler:
http://www.osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_V ision.htm [osafoundation.org]

Haystack:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]

Re:Score for FireFox users...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually very easy to code a site to html standards that also works in IE.

That depends on your definition of "easy". It can take hours to track down some of the more bizarre bugs stopping something from working properly in Internet Explorer. If you are an experienced web developer, you learn to spot them and differentiate between the bugs over time, but you shouldn't have to be an expert in a browser's bugs just to put together a website. I've been working around Internet Explorer's weirdness for years, and I still have trouble sometimes.

In some cases, it's absolutely impossible to write to spec and also handle Internet Explorer adequately. For example, Internet Explorer's HTTP implementation has a number of shortcomings (and the default language setting for English speakers makes it impossible to do language negotiation to spec.).