Super-Fast RDF Search Engine Developed

The Register is reporting that Irish researchers have developed a new high-speed RDF search engine capable of answering search queries with more than seven billion RDF statements in mere fractions of a second. "'The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated,' said Professor Stefan Decker, director of DERI. 'These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links. The technology also allows us to combine information from the web, for example the engine can list all partnerships of a company even if there is no single web page that lists all of them.'"

Links!

[SolitaryMan]

These results enable us to create web search engines that really deliver answers instead of links.

I need both: answers *and* links! Many times when I search the web, I don't know for sure what am I searching for, let alone being able to ask specific question...

Great!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all we need to do is get everyone to start using RDF.... wait.. you dont even know what that is??

Hype

[gvc]

users should get more relevant results

Yet another /. article parroting an uncritical popular press account of a press release.

Next up: Ontology spam

[G4from128k]

Yes, creating a consistent ontology is challenge. But the bigger challenge is the lack of incentive for ontology truthfulness. If this type of search becomes popular, ontology spam and OSEO (Ontology Search Engine Optimization) will become a booming industry.

Cannot be overestimated

[stevenp]

- "The importance of this breakthrough cannot be overestimated"

The importance of any event can be overestimated and quite often is overestimated. It is called hype.
When speaking of XML, XHTML and semantic WEB then the word "overestimated" fits just nice.
If this was not the case then HTML should long have been dead and the whole WEB should have been based on pure XML with meaningful tags.

-- Do not read me, I am a stupid tag

Re:This could be huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the minor little problem of getting everyone to agree on the ontologies. Being able to search quickly is important, but until somebody comes up with the Dewey Decimal System for all knowledge, it won't mean much.

How about the Dewey Decimal System?

Re:This could be huge

[complete loony]

Ah, but the Dewey Decimal system only works because responsible people are involved in categorizing everything. They let just anyone publish information on the internet these days.

TMA: Too Many Acronyms

[EccentricAnomaly]

Why assume everyone knows your acronyms. To me RDF means "Reality Distortion Field". Zeesh, 7 billion triples or whatever.

Re:Here's the Tech Report

[$RANDOMLUSER]

You are too modest. You're the lead author. Congratulations on a first-rate contribution to mankind. And such a young pup [harth.org], too.

Re:Hype

[StefanDecker]

We have a Technical Report available at http://www.deri.ie/fileadmin/documents/DERI-TR-200 7-04-20.pdf [www.deri.ie] that should answer most of the technical questions. From the abstract: "We present the architecture of an end-to-end search engine that uses a graph data model to enable interactive query answering over structured and interlinked data collected from many disparate sources on the Web. In particular, we study distributed indexing methods for graph-structured data and parallel query evaluation methods on a cluster of computers. We evaluate the system on a dataset with 430 million statements collected from the Web, and provide scale-up experiments on 7 billion synthetically generated statements."

RDF is a bad idea

[Zarf]

I just read the basics [w3.org] of RDF and I can see that this could be a really really bad idea. If RDF is intended as an internal data representation for a search engine company to use then this is great. The search engine company or your own company's search engine staff can police and audit your RDF data. However, if I'm reading this right RDF is *supposed* to be populated by *volunteered* data. As such you're going to suffer not just the Wikipedia effect but all the problems seen in MetaData from an internet generation ago.

You'll see RDF associations linking the president to a crass picture of a donkey or a goat of some kind. You'll see companies set up to deliberately poison RDF data with false links designed to drive traffic to a site... you'll see sock-puppets and all kinds of other attacks.

This whole effort reminds me of the "this is spam" bit that was proposed to stop spam. You can't expect spammers to say to themselves, "wait, I better flip the this-is-spam but to true before I send this" you also can't expect people to not abuse the RDF system in similar ways.

Don't expect that if you RDF search for Stephen King that everything that comes up was actually posted by him. Imagine the pages that would get attributed to the president or Mr. T as a prank... the information would only be useful if you could verify the document as legitimate first.

The "is part of" feature is the most likely target of abuse I think. I could say that everything I wrote is part of the New York Times or as part of some official document that gets searched for often. The result would be erroneous hits in RDF search and artificial authority for my crack pot theories.

Re:Next up: Ontology spam

[treeves]

Ontology SPAM is OK, but Epistemology Spread is really yummy!