In my newest post at Semantic Focus, I described the difference between building semantics and building the Web. A real Semantic-Web company needs to demonstrate its ability on both aspects instead of only one of them. By simply adopting RDF, a company cannot automatically become a Semantic-Web company.
In my newest Semantic Focus article, I casually introduced ontology mapping and its solutions by discussing an interesting issue---The Curse of Knowledge. The following is a quote from the article:
"Since the Curse of Knowledge is a major reason for ontology mapping on the Semantic Web, we may try to solve this problem by breaking the Curse of Knowledge. By breaking this curse, we may solve the problem of ontology mapping in reality more easily than trying to exploit the complex algorithms of computer science."
Check out the complete article at Semantic Focus if you would be interested in.
This is my most recent post at Semantic Focus. In this post I shared my view of a web of data. The following are selected quotes from the article.
A web of data is a network of data whose local characters are specified by metadata and global characters are specified by hyperdata.
A web thread is a reference to a named web location. Unlike a web link, a web thread connects arbitrary numbers of objects at the same time. In contrast to unidirectional, a web thread is omnidirectional. Data in a thread is automatically connected to all other data in the same thread. All the data connected by the same web thread mutually supplements each other in semantics.
With web threads, do we still need web links in a web of data? The answer is yes. Web threads cannot completely replace web links. Web links have their irreplaceable semantics.
But isn't "incorrectness" a synonym of creativeness? If we want to engage collective intelligence in a web of data, allowing and encouraging subjective (and biased) assignment of web links is fundamental to explore human creativity.
In summary, a web of agents is what ordinary users can see about the Semantic Web at the front end, while a web of data is what professional developers understand to be the essence of the Semantic Web at the back end. These two presentations tell a common story from two different sides.
If you are interested in my interpretation about "a web of data," check out the full story at Semantic Focus.
Allow me to do a little bit advertisement. (Very rarely I do so.) Planet Semantic Focus is now open to the public. Planet Semantic Focus is an automated aggregator that delivers the most up-to-time news and discussions primarily from various semantic-web-oriented blogs. It is a nice place to check if you do not have the time or patience to wander through all these sites. Added with this important piece, SemanticFocus grows closer and closer to be a central hub of digested semantic-web information. James Simmons has done terrific work on building up the site. Great work, James!
In this most recent post at SemanticFocus, I present two philosophies about realizing Semantic Web. Whether we want to approach it by building a Tower of Babel, or we want to approach it by building a virtual society. From the pure academic point of view, "a web of data" is equivalent to "a web of agents." From the practical point of view, however, this philosophical difference may eventually lead to different fate of Semantic Web.
I have a new post at the Semantic Focus blog. Also I appreciate James Simmons for his help of editing my original submission. This article discusses issues on the philosophical level and probably it is more related to the new realm of Web Science. So it should be easily readable for all persons, even if they are not familiar to the idea of semantic web.
In this new post, I discussed several debatable issues about semantic web. Particularly, these are the main viewpoints in the post.
1) A semantic web must simultaneously be a proactive web, while the traditional Web is a reactive web.
2) Web 2.0 is a low-degree active web, an initial step towards the Semantic Web.
3) In a semantic web, each web node by default has a unique interpretation about the existing web. In contrast, in the traditional Web every web node by default shares a common interpretation about the existing web.
4) The motivation of seeking increased communication will help construct greater scale ontological agreements. The motivation of seeking profits of invention, however, will help construct brand new ontological agreements to replace old ones. This is a secret in modern democratic society; and this is the secret to construct a practical semantic world from bottom-up.
For more details, readers can watch the full post at here.
World Wide Web was designed to be a node-driven weaved web. The current web is a set of nodes connected by manually assigned links. In contrast, the ideal Semantic Web (if ever realized) must be a thread-driven weaved web. In such a Semantic Web, the machine-processable semantics are the objective threads that connect all the nodes. In such a Semantic Web, the importance of individual nodes become less and less. On the contrary, threads become fundamental.
I posted a new article at Semantic Focus in which I presented a new vision of Thread-Driven Semantic Web.
I have posted a new article to Semantic Focus, a blog in which I was a joint author. The title of the article is Satisfying the Nature of Selfishness: The Key to Initiate the Semantic Web.
The discussion of semantic search has gradually become popular. Just not long time ago, semantic search was thought to be barely a little bit more than a dream. At present, optimistic researchers have started to believe its possibility in the near future. Very recently at Read/WriteWeb, Dr. Riza C. Berkan, the CEO of Hakia (a company declared to perform "semantic search"), posted an article about semantic search that attracted much attention. Despite of agreeing with the post, here are more thoughts about semantic search.
Semantic search has two legs: semantic understanding and proactive collaboration. Until now, however, most semantic search articles only have focused on the first one. Including Hakia, an "ideal" semantic search engine is popularly thought to be alike a "semantics-enhanced Google." This is, however, a narrowed thought. The intension of semantic search is more beyond "semantics + search."
In order to better understand these two legs, we may watch a regular semantic search scenario in human society that is, however, often overlooked. We humans have daily practised a type of semantic search very successfully for centuries. We ask questions; everybody asks questions, from children to adults. We ask questions to look for answers. These question-and-answer behaviors are typical semantic search activities.
When we are young, we look for answers from parents, whose words are oracles to us. When we grow older, we look for answers from teachers, whose words are oracles to us. When we grow even older, we start to realize that there are indeed no oracles. We start to look for answers by ourselves. In particular, we make friends with various specialities. These friends become our sources of question answering when we get troubles in particular realms. At the meantime, we ourselves also become such a type of sources to our friends. These links constitute a delicate, complicate, and successfully executed network of semantic search in our human society.
If we take a closer look at this successful semantic search network, we can find two fundamental factors that support its execution. First, its success relies on the ability of semantic understanding at each but not some of its nodes. It is generally believed that the set of human knowledge is too rich and too complicated to be executed in a centralized way. For instance, Mor Naaman at Yahoo! Research very recently said that "there is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with 'semantic' labels" in a WWW2007 panel. Therefore, representations of global semantics are better to be distributed widely other than be accumulated onto only a few special nodes. In consequence, every node in this semantic search network has its ability to perform a certain level of search depending on its own capability of semantic understanding. This is the basis of a successful semantic search network.
Beyond the local semantic understanding on every node, a successful semantic search network also requires proactive collaborations. In a search network, some nodes (such as professors) may have much greater capability than others (such as first-grade students). But even the node with the greatest ability is still very much limited in its search capability when the search space is about the whole set of human knowledge. A successful semantic search network demands well collaboration among individual search nodes. Moreover, such a type of collaborations appeals to being proactive.
Proactiveness is a unique factor in the network of friendship. The network of friendship is not only a regular social network, but also a search network. When we get troubles, we used to get to our friends for help. Nevertheless, we often make friends on purpose, i.e. in contrast to randomly or aimlessly. A successful semantic search network in human society is priorly built on the joint or depending interest of individuals. For example, both John and Mary love music; so John actively make friend with Mary. Another example, John play piano and does not know to tune a piano; Kate, however, is good at tuning pianos. For the sake of his future requirement of piano-tuning, John proactively make friend with Kate. The third example, Rose is good at history literature; John, however, does not like to read history literature. In consequence, John inactively make friend with Rose. These examples show that the establishing of a search network very much depends on the proactiveness (which in turn decided by the semantic understanding of interests) of these nodes to make connections.
In summary, semantic search naturally contradicts to the centralized web search strategy. In order to activate semantic search to the practical level, we need a search network that is participated by all web users beyond the few independent and aggregated semantic search nodes such as Hakia. The entire web search strategy must experience some revolutionary change other than simple makeups. In the second part of my article about web evolution, I have more discussions about the collaborative search for the future semantic web.
The initial draft of this post is published at SemanticFocus.
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