Evolution of Web Search

I have a guest post about Web search evolution at Alt Search Engines.

In short, the main point of the article is as follows.

There are two basic types of quality Web search engines need to be aware.

1) There is a quality about how well the search results produced to match the user requests.

2) There is a quality about how a search engine has produced the link resources based on the search results so that the produced link resources are more feasible to be further manufactured.

I argue that it is the second quality that drives the evolution of Web search.

Evolution of Web Business

This is my newest article in Semantic Report. In this article I present my thoughts of web evolution in the business realm. A truth is that when the Web evolves, most of the businesses on the Web must evolve simultaneously to simply survive. Maybe it is a little bit surprising, but Web business is indeed one of the most risky business categories in the world because of web evolution. New businesses always have plenty of chances, while old businesses often struggle on catching up with the step of web evolution.

In this article, I describe that the success of a hard-core web business (i.e. a company cannot survive without the Web) depends on the implementation of three things: bring its customers the chances of making money, bring its customers the entertainments, or help its customers be recognized and remembered. A successful implementation of any of the three philosophies can lead to a successful company. But a great company always engages at least two of the thoughts. If a company successfully implements all the three issues, it becomes unbeatable.

On the other hand, the progress of web evolution provides richer and richer ways for people to implement these three philosophical thoughts. If a company does not frequently upgrade its implementation according to the progress of web evolution, the company may easily be swapped out of the market by its new competitors that directly adopt the newest implementation methods in web evolution. This is thus the exciting but also the cruel side of the web business evolution.

You may check out the full article at the December 2007 edition of the Semantic Report.

Upgrade RW to RWR

Invited by Scott Koegler, the editor of SemanticReport.com, I wrote an article to explain the Read/Write/Request Web and its potential business impacts. Since SemanticReport is primarily a business-oriented site, I did not have many chances to explain the technical side of this Read/Write/Request Web. But to the least I have explained where this term comes and the prediction of the addition of Request, a new fundamental web operation, to the next generation web. Moreover, I also briefly discussed why the plot of Read/Write/Request Web is technically achievable, commercially marketable, and materially profitable.

This article is also an informal response to the 10 More Future Web Trends, in which Richard at Read/WriteWeb argued that the description of Read/Write/Request Web was complex. Indeed, however, this description is not complex at all after we understand what Request is.

This Read/Write/Request Web is part of my vision of Web 3.0. I am just about to start the first installment of this new series on towards the new generation web. In this series, I will discuss the vision of Read/Write/Request Web deeper and broader from the technology and web evolution points of view. So please remember to keep watching this new series if you are interested in Read/Write/Request Web.

Epistemological extension to ontologies: a key of realizing Semantic Web?

(updated Dec. 21, 2007)

When discussing Semantic Web, we often think of ontologies. Ontology contains formal specifications of conceptualizations. By linking world facts to ontological declarations, machines can "understand" the meanings of these facts. Moreover, machines can reason on ontology declarations to derive latent conclusions based on explicit ontological expressions. These logical computations form the foundation of the Semantic Web.

But there is a problem. The process of linking world facts to ontology declarations is often ambiguous and subjective. This process, also normally addressed as the process of semantic annotation, is related to another branch of philosophy---epistemology. It short, epistemology studies how we know what we know. A narrower definition of epistemology could be expressed as the study of how we recognize what we know. Human recognition is often subjective.

Besides the distinction of subjectiveness and objectiveness, epistemology is more about the knowledge of recognition. This knowledge of recognition is generally bound to the superficial side of meanings, such as the form and the display, in contrast to that ontology is more about the intrinsic side of concepts themselves. The knowledge in ontologies should not be affected by its external representations, such as the form and the display. The understanding of this distinction is critical to the understanding of semantic annotation.

We should equip machines with not only ontologies but also epistemologies to realize the Semantic Web. Without epistemologies, machines with standard ontologies by themselves can neither recognize new facts, nor verify the correctness of their assigned facts. Hence they must rely on external procedures (such as data extraction routines) to accomplish these missing functions. This type of external procedures are hard to be modified and updated. As a result, we may ask why we must adopt the epistemological declarations produced by others for our own ontology declarations. To solve this problem, we need declarative (but not hard-coded programming subroutines) epistemological extensions to ontologies.

Epistemological extensions of ontologies allow individuals to specify different things of recognition with respect to the same ontology. This requirement is common in our real society. For example, different people may have varied external interpretations of an agreed, shared definition of the concept "beauty." By separating epistemological declarations and ontological declarations, we can have a better and more flexible handling of semantics. This is a key of realizing Semantic Web.

For readers who are interested in exploring more on this topic. Here is a recently accepted paper by the First International workshop on Ontologies and Information Systems for the Semantic Web (ONISW 2007) collocated with ER 2007.