The Web of Data, Beyond What Google and Yahoo Show 50
jccq writes "Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. It also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. Here are a screencast and a blog post, with semantic-web-geek details."
Markup (Score:4, Informative)
RDF is nice and there are various different syntaxes for it (including various triples formats), and promises, if it can be built, deployed and trusted(!!!) to make the web ever so much more searchable. This will depend though on people writing good ontologies (not easy) and using them correctly (even less easy).
RDFa and microformats look, on the surface at least, to be nice ways to manage RDF type information in HTML. But I'm a bit more dubious - they don't, in many cases, have careful ontologies built around them - when they do (RDFa, mostly) they seem to be very resource intensive (a heavily RDFa annotated HTML page is likely to balloon to several times the same page without RDFa), and the uses of them I've seen have been less than convincingly correct. This doesn't mean that they're useless, just that they're not doing the job at the moment, or they're doing the job poorly.
The solution that seems to be favored by the semantic web types is to present RDF pages as an alternative to HTML pages when RDF is requested. This looks, by far, to be the best way to work this, but does require site builders (and CMSs and web frameworks), and content authors, to be able to build correct RDF pages that represent the information presented, often at the same time as they present HTML pages to human readers (and non-RDF search engines). This is going to be a major problem.
Re:Fixed for you... (Score:1, Informative)
I used to smoke - now I'm smoking
ah yes, semantic web via RDF is the future (Score:3, Informative)
It was the future in 2001 [amazon.com]; inspired the masses with its vision of the glorious future in 2003 [amazon.com]; and of course we are presumably right on the cusp of this golden future today.
Re:Cat got my tongue (Score:4, Informative)
I managed to try it out while it was posted on the firehose, and the very initial impression was good. Gradually, however, I noticed that it was just dumping data on my lap, and left it up to me to sort it out. It reminded me a bit of Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com], except half of the information was wrong (and if I gave it names, most of the information was wrong).
Even within the presentation, they point out the flaw of having to sift through the mess and pick out the irrelevant information.
I don't think it's useless, I mean it does provide you with many links that you'd normally not get on other search engines, at least when you enter something unique as a query. But as far as actually placing relevant information in brackets (location:... history:... personal-information:...), it doesn't do a very good job.
Also, if something is truly unique, you'll get a better result in wikipedia anyway (in terms of how its arranged, anyway). And if you want more accurate info dumps, Wolfram Alpha currently does it better.
Re:Fixed for you... (Score:5, Informative)
I was looking for the origin, actually... :-/
http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/usedto.html [englishpage.com]
"Used to" expresses the idea that something was an old habit that stopped in the past. It indicates that something was often repeated in the past, but it is not usually done now.
I wonder how you could ever tell a semantic search engine that you wanted the history of the idiom itself. Google picked it right up though, just had to search for "used to" quoted.
Semantic intelligence in the form of incoming links is pretty damned powerful, anyway.
Re:Fixed for you... (Score:3, Informative)