Things understood by computers

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

• The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
• John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
• "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers?

Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price)

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Find content for hypertexts

Evri builds the tools that will make it easier for users to find the content they're most interested in.

By placing widgets on article pages, you'll make it easy for users to browse the articles, images, and video they're looking for, from your site, and from the rest of the web.

Find out more about Evri...

How to put Evri to work for you:

There are a number of ways to make Evri's widget available to users visiting your website. You can place it alongside your articles, embed the widget at the end of an article, or place the Evri button in the text.
For more information on how to put Evri to work on your site, contact Steve Moss, VP, Strategy and Business Development: steve@evri.com

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Semantic widget

Evri, a Seattle-based semantic-Web project backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, has thrown open the doors on its beta site and on Evri's Garden, a sandbox for researchers and interested bystanders.

Formerly known as Hypertext Solutions, Evri's first widget offering in the Garden is a pop-up that examines the words it finds significant (generally nouns) on a page and returns various related articles, images, and video, and (if sufficient connections are available) a circle-and spoke chart, showing terms with which a given word has a close connection. An automatically generated chart might link, for example, "Barack Obama" with "Joe Biden," or "Beverly Hills" with "Ed McMahon," or "Mariners" with "failure." (I may have made that last one up. You can check for yourself on Evri's site or download the widget for your own uses.)

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Problem with semantic search

When applied to Internet searches, semantic technology delivers results oriented to what people seem to be seeking instead of simply matching words used to online content.

For example, a semantic online search for "melancholy songs with birds" would know to link sadness in lyrics with various species of birds.

Cognition's semantic map is already used in a LexisNexis Concordance "e-discovery" software to sift through documents amassed during evidence phases of trials.

"We help them find the needle in a haystack," Jarus from Cognition.com said.
"It used to be boxes and boxes of paper and now 80 percent of it is digital. Lawyers can search for a smoking gun within that discovery material."

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- Jean-Philippe Pastor

More human-like in my computering

Cognition's Semantic NLP technology, please visit http://www.cognition.com/.

Cognition Technologies, based in Los Angeles, has developed a revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology which adds word and phrase meaning and "understanding" to computer applications, enabling them to be more human-like in their processing of information. Cognition's Semantic Map, the underlying technology developed over the past 23 years, is the largest and most extensive in existence.

Applications and technologies which utilize Cognition's Semantic NLP(TM) technology are positioned to take full advantage of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web).

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Semantic technologies

This where a new breed of so-called semantic technologies comes into the frame. Unlike ranking algorithms such as Google's PageRank for predicting relevancy, semantic search dips into the meaning in language to produce highly relevant search results," according to a report published by Ovum analysts Mike Davis and Madan Sheina.

Notable semantic web providers singled out by the analysts include Expert System, Powerset, Yedda, Trovix and Hakia.

According to the authors, awareness of semantic search rose when Microsoft picked up two semantic search companies Powerset and Zoomix.

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Semantic cluster graphs

Makers of Cluuz.com, a semantic search engine attemps to get users to rethink the way they find information online.

Mr. Frank surmises, ''What consumers want is to be able to find information faster, and they want clues to help them find their way to that information faster. What we're doing is quite unique and nobody can do what we're doing.'' According to Mr. Frank, search engines such as Cluuz use the science of semantics - the study of meaning in language - to produce more relevant searches.While the site works as a stand-alone search engine, it could also work if it were rolled into existing offerings at Google, Yahoo or Microsoft's MSN.

Cluuz also shows the connections between various Web documents and sites based not on actual links between pages but on the information on the pages through a technology it calls semantic cluster graphs. It displays these results in a visual format that resembles a spider's web !

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Design principles of semantic web

Semantic web comprises a set of design principles, collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies.

Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that are yet to be implemented or realized. Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications. Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

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Semantic web technology

Aggregator sites, such as Dogpile, which check several engines at the same time, could weaken Google's dominance.

They can be very helpful because search engines index their results in different ways. Semantic search engines, which focus on the meaning of your search rather than just the keyword, could be the next big thing in search, according to Ben Camm-Jones, news editor of Web User magazine. If there's going to be anything, it will be semantic web technology that overtakes Google - if it's a really compelling proposition, and if, somehow, we can shake people out of this belief that Google is the only way to find information on the web.

Microsoft have invested in this area by buying the semantic site, Powerset.

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Semantic web in Europe

Europe has long been the powerhouse of Semantic Web research, with centres of global excellence such as DERI, Southampton, the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, Karlsruhe, and others; research funding from the bottomless coffers of the European Commission; and an early recognition from European companies such as BT, Vodafone and (my employer) Talis that R&D investment would reap dividends in this area.

Europe has been less good, though, at transferring some of this excellence from the lab to the office, with a rather insular community of researchers tending to talk to one another at events such as the annual European Semantic Web Conference rather than turning to the real markets where their innovations might usefully be scaled and monetised.

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Theory of meaning and circularity

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

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Semantic web

Sir Bernard Berners-Lee recently discussed how the 'semantic web' will form the next stage of the web's evolution - essentially allowing users to collect data together whether it's part of the world wide web or not.

He gave the example of combining online bank statements and photos with a desktop calendar, allowing people to work out what they were doing when they took a particular photo.
Summing up the development of the web, Berners-Lee said: "A small number of ideas have a disproportionate impact."
Berners-Lee proposed the world wide web in 1989 while working as a software engineer at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
The global project created a web of connections to information on the internet using hypertext documents. During the early 1990s Berners-Lee worked to develop the web, specifying the URL, HTTP and HTML standards.

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Bottom-up or top-down hypertextual approach

The fundamental problem that semantic web needs to solve is explaining the meaning of things to computers.

There are several approaches to this, all of which in principle can work.

There are companies and technologies that are doing it bottom up - by embedding semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data. The opposite camp is exploring the top-down approach, which relies on analyzing existing information.

The ultimate top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to understand text like people do.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Theory of meaning and circularity

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/

See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Meaning and truth

In semantics, the truth condition of a sentence is almost universally considered to be distinct from its meaning.

The meaning of a sentence is conveyed if the truth conditions for the sentence are understood. Additionally, there are many sentences that are understood although their truth condition is uncertain. One popular argument for this view is that some sentences are necessarily true--that is, they are true whatever happens to obtain. All such sentences have the same truth conditions, but arguably do not thereby have the same meaning.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Language and finite form

In "Truth and Meaning," Donald Davidson argued that any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions—as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle.

If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms. "Giving the meaning of a sentence", he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions, so originating the modern work on truth-conditional semantics.

In sum, he proposed that it must be possible to distinguish a finite number of distinct grammatical features of a language, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences making use of that feature.

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Network of signifiers

Deconstruction grew out of structuralism.

But whereas structuralists argued that meaning can be pinned down in a network of signifiers, Jacques Derrida argued that meaning is always deferred, pushed back on something else, and therefore never present.

This process Derrida calls différance, a portmanteau word combining the ideas of difference and deferral. Meaning is always put off, never immediately available. Moreover, ideas are always implicated in their opposites. Binary oppositions — black and white, master and slave, beauty and ugliness — are defined in terms of their opposites, and neither pole has meaning without the other.

Deconstruction is notoriously complex, and is very badly served by a brief glossary entry. Many of its practitioners do little to make it easy for you: their prose style can be extremely dense. M. H. Abrams offers a good, clear discussion in a few pages in his Glossary of Literary Terms. A more thorough introduction is Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction.

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Bare minimum of visual distraction when hyperlinking

The important thing is to hyperlink meaningful text.

You're contributing to the overall semantic nature of the Web by linking meaningful text. Yet if you look at sites for best hypertextual design, their linking styles range from Joyce's afternoon minimalism to Gizmodo's very formal, end-of-item announcements (in a different color, not underlined) of "Product Page," taking you to the official page for the product the blog item was about. For the most part, though, the sites' links, while mostly using underlining, are kept to the bare minimum of visual distraction within the body of text: a key noun or a punchy, active-verb phrase ("generate a sitemap" in Pearsonified).

In my own Metabole, after first going with big, long link phrases and then liking, for a time, the directness of a go "here" as the link, I moved on. I tried, recently, extreme minimalism in the links I was making to other hypertextual articles. I'd build the link in a verb relating to a story's action: "renaming," "looking," or even the simple "says."

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts