University Launches Semantic Web Interface 191
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
If a webmaster starts to shift his focus from IE to FireFox/Mozilla, he is just being as bad as all the other webmasters who give preference to IE users.
Yes, Firefox is all open source and everything, I agree, it should supported. But that does not mean webmasters should just drop development for other web browsers.
We should be encouraging webmasters to make their websites work in all browsers, not one specific.
Just working in Firefox is no better then just working in IE.
Interesting Subject (Score:2, Insightful)
This whole "semantic web" thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't find fine is that this interface doesn't somehow derive meaning from documents and bring that meaning together, it's simply an interface to a hierarchical information store. Do we need a new name for that, or would "a bunch of windows that are interdependent" be fine for people who aren't being poseurs?
Re:Score for FireFox users... (Score:0, Insightful)
"provided the basic information is available" (Score:5, Insightful)
Waddia know, we still need librarians after all!
Re:Score for FireFox users... (Score:5, Insightful)
If a webmaster starts to shift his focus from IE to FireFox/Mozilla, he is just being as bad as all the other webmasters who give preference to IE users.
Not necessarily - Firefox, like most other FOSS browsers, is standards-compliant, IE isn't. This is the biggest obstacle to having a website that can be viewed by any browser.
So if this is down to a website complying with the correctstandards, the problem is squarely with IE, and may convince M$ to do it everybody else's way, instead of insisting that everybody else does it the M$ way. . .
So long as the choice is "Should we make our site standards-compliant or IE-compatible?" there can never be a truly universal website.
and then... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Score for FireFox users... (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, computer science researchers, such as those at the University of Southampton who developed this, don't have a particular requirement (moral or actual) to develop "for all platforms". They are interested in research - showing something can be done, and publishing details on it when they have shown it can be done, not waiting til they have also ported it to all proprietary platforms.
This isn't a product; it's a research demo.
Buzzword Bingo (Score:2, Insightful)
This interface does not provide a true linguistic or semantic approach to finding meaning. It provides a hierarchal drill down of data... which is nice, but its not semantic. Semantic search should derive meaning from my intent, or my communication of intent to the interface. Google is actually more semantically oriented. I provide the tokens of language, the interface should parse those tokens and realize my meaning. It can then provide me information based on that intent. This "semantic" interface provides me general meaning first and I have to figure out how that matters to me. Based on the premise of this article, I was hoping the interface would be able to parse language for meaning (better than Google) and then zap out some adequate results. Maybe something like "how did people feel about Bach's music?" and it would tell me all about how he was viewed in popular culture. Instead, I have to first know that Bach was a Classisist and then I can find that information in his larger biography. Not semantic.
If a person has a good understanding of how to create meaning for Google, it can provide better semantic searching than this interface. This is not unlike how people communicate when language is uncommon between them. If we're both speaking the same language, we should understand each other's meaning easily. Deeper meanings can also be derived (sarcasm, emotional cues, etc). When language is a barrier, the relation of meaning breaks down into simpler forms. Many language nuances get lost in the translation. Likewise, search engines are not quite up to speed with things like abstract connections between concepts in language. They understand that language has tokens, but they don't always make meaningful relationships between them.
Re:This whole "semantic web" thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a more functional sense, the pieces are slowly being put into place, but as long as there are a huge number of people with varying mental processes "marking up" the data, the whole thing won't be any more than a labor-intensive way of making new web pages. Where I believe it will work is where you have a trusted source of data that is in a known heirarchical format that can be preprocessed into a set interdependent links. Endeca (sp?) does a good job of this for individual commerce sites (I think CompUSA's search is powered by Endeca). iTunes (or any other music database) and IMDB are other good examples of data sources that could be wrapped with semantic meaning. Perhaps these trusted sources will eventually merge so that a the "seven degrees of Kevin Bacon" could expand to cover the world of music (how many degrees of separation between Kevin and Bach?).
Re:Great step forward, but big problem (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd applaud if it has been done: if there's a site or space i can go to right now that will let me easily explore information spaces, see interconnections, associations, that looks to do that not just with a lonely database but with a www of data, that would be awesome.
where is it?
thanks