It's Just Semantics

"Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million. Yelp was founded in 2004 as a way to let users leave reviews on local businesses. Comscore puts worldwide traffic at nearly 9 million monthly unique visitors, and it has been growing fast – the company says it’s real numbers are more like 25 million monthly uniques." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Google positioned to own both sides of the "snippet." - Cliff Gerrish

"But it is the personalisation of search where Mayer sees the real future of Google’s powerful engine. “Although we search the web right now, what we really want to do is search it as each individual user sees the web. We want Google to be the most accurate reference tool which allows people to search the web and each have an individual experience,” she says. Mayer thinks the key will be when Google can include people’s friends’ personal updates from social networks such as Facebook in search and serve these results personally to the correct people. Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users’ privacy settings are ‘public’. According to Mayer – the ideal will be to get access to your friend’s updates in search: “Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public – will really empower us in terms of search.”" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

There seems to be some dissenting opinion about the 'real future' of search. Social/Public/Private/RealTime seems to have supplanted Semantic. - Cliff Gerrish

"Last year, a company called DWave Systems announced their quantum computer (the ‘Orion’) – another milestone on the road to practical quantum computing. Their controversial claims seem worthy in their own right but they are particularly important to the semantic web (SW) community. The significance to the SW community was that their quantum computer solved problems akin to Grover’s Algorithm speeding up queries of disorderly databases. Semantic web databases are not (completely) disorderly and there are many ways to optimize the search for matching triples to a graph pattern. What strikes me is that the larger the triple store, the more compelling the case for using some kind of quantum search algorithm to find matches. DWave are currently trialing 128qbit processors, and they claim their systems can scale, so I (as a layman) can see no reason why such computers couldn’t be used to help improve the performance of queries in massive triple stores." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Our language is limited and imperfect. Typically, people type search queries quickly and with little forethought, so queries are definitely less than perfect. When a customer constructs a query that may have more than one meaning, a good search user interface provides tools to help the customer define the query in less ambiguous terms, so the search results more closely match the person’s intention. This process is known as disambiguation, and best practices for effectively supporting the disambiguation of search queries are the subject of this column." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Linked Data, like its umbrella Semantic Web Project, has suffered from an inadvertent oversight on the parts of many of its enthusiasts (myself included): 100% of the discussion spaces are created by, geared towards, or dominated by researchers (from Academia primarily) and/or developers. Thus, at the very least, we've been operating in an echo chamber that only feed the existing void between the core community and those who are more interested in discussing business and marketing related topics. The new discussion space seeks to cover the following: 1. Brainstorming Value Proposition Articulation 2. War Story Exchanges 3. Case Studies and Use-cases 4. Market Research & Positioning (for instance Linked Data is killer technology that redefines Data Integration, but none of the major research firms currently make that connection)" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

I'm supportive of anything that puts semwebers in touch with voices outside of their echo chamber. - Cliff Gerrish

"The problem with explicit metadata like this is that it's liable to gaming. But more dangerously, it generally only captures what we already know. By contrast, implicit metadata can surprise us, giving us new insight into the world. Consider Flickr's maps created by geotagged photos, which show the real boundaries of where people go in cities and what they do there. Here, the metadata may be added explicitly by humans, but it is increasingly added automatically by the camera itself. (The most powerful architecture of participation is one in which data is provided by default, without the user even knowing he or she is doing it.)" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Oreilly's comment is key to why the 'semantic' web will always produce 'meaning' that is destined to disappoint. - Cliff Gerrish

I'd say drop 'ontology' for all audiences. It adds depth where there is none. - Cliff Gerrish

"This is huge. To be able to request implicit destinations based off of realtime information is something that has never been available before. What new queries will be available to us because of this? Google has a lot of data. How much of it can be assigned a location? Lots. There are millions of KML files out on the internet. Here are some of the useful queries "Take me to Bob Smith" - If Bob is your friend on Latitude then Google Maps Navigation can take you to him. If Bob moves then GMN could even re-route you. I wonder if they will enable the chase scenario." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Mashing up real-time data points -- now you're talkin' - Cliff Gerrish

"The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more. These 10 products may not be the type of Semantic Web apps that the W3C envisaged in the 90s, but that no longer seems to matter. What's important is that the Web is becoming more meaningful - more semantic." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

A better way to put it is more content is coming from structured data - it's not more meaningful or 'semantic' - it's just coming from a database. - Cliff Gerrish

"The Open Web Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa). The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable. This reusable agreement is designed to be easily adopted by a wide range of specification communities and organizations as an alternative to the challenging -- and costly -- process of negotiating new licensing agreements every time. Specifications made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement may include everything from small ad-hoc formats sketched out among friends to large... more... - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Clean html and "validated" html need have no relation. - Cliff Gerrish

"Most content is not very smart. In fact, most content is unstructured and usually more difficult to process automatically. Think flat text files, HTML without all the end tags, etc. Unstructured content is more difficult for computers to interpret and understand than structured content due to incompleteness and ambiguity inherent in the content. Unstructured content usually requires humans to decipher the structure and the meaning, or even to apply formatting for display rendering." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Smart" isn't the right adjective. What he's describing is XML. - Cliff Gerrish

"From the technology point of view, the Curse of Knowledge on the Semantic Web is reflected by the difficulty of ontology mapping. Basically, experts often have ontologies full of professional constructs in their mind about their domain of expertise. These professional ontologies are well sharable among peer experts, but are usually less accessible by laymen. In contrast, laymen also have their unprofessional descriptions of the respective domains, i.e. the layman requests. To construct mappings between expert ontologies and layman requests is the task of ontology mapping. This ontology mapping problem is a long-term difficult problem in the realm of knowledge management." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Of course, opinion is never useful in solving a problem.... - Cliff Gerrish

""Semantic". By starting the name this way, you have essentially, avoidably, uselessly doomed the whole named enterprise before it starts. Most people don't have the slightest idea what this word even means, most of the people who do have an idea think it implies pointless distinctions, and everybody left after you eliminate those two groups will still have to argue about what "semantic" means. This is a rare actual example of begging the question. Or to put it in terms you will understand: congratulations, you've introduced terminological head recursion. Any wonder the program never gets around to doing anything?" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

You mean: "hasn't drunk kool-aid" yet - still capable of independent thought? - Cliff Gerrish

By using multiple keywords, users create their own faceted search and contexts. - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

(The snake oil is added at no extra charge) - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"this morning i was contacted by the Linked Data™ Police. i found the following email in my inbox, from a pretty well-established researcher at a pretty well-established institution: I came across this: http://repositories.cdlib.org/ischool... So you consciously redefine term "linked data" to mean something different. Look, the big point of linked data is that it means you are interoperable with a large number of existing data sources available in the same data model and protocol, like Freebase, DBpedia, Geonames, and so forth. I had to explain to colleagues that no, there is nobody working on providing linked data for recovery.gov, and the guys in Berkeley who claim to be working on it are actually just abusing the term as a buzzword in order to get free attention, but actually have no intention of delivering anything that's interoperable with the linked data standards. There are perfectly descriptive terms for the technology you are using, REST and ROA. You do a disservice to... more... - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"It has deployed Expert System’s Cogito semantic solution to help add value to user searches for used cars in its portal to the world of classified car sales. “Semantic tools are extremely beneficial to being able to properly understand classified ads and categorize them correctly and accurately,” says Luigi Conti, director of publisher Editoriale Domus. “Semantic capabilities ease the way people interact with our search engine, and we want the search experience to be as easy as asking a question to a live person.”" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more meaningful and relevant to me when it is layered with contextual social data based on my identity. This is the pragmatic Web." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"In other words, our saying ‘pieces of plastic and metal of such and such a shape count as screwdrivers’ is simply giving a label Y to the X term; satisfying the X term in these cases is already sufficient for satisfying the Y term. As such, one can use an individually count a particular object as a screwdriver independent of what anybody else might think about the object. Such is not the case for institutional facts, for the very functionality of institutional facts derives from the fact that other do count X as Y. What makes institutional facts different from social facts is that the Y term assigns a status to the object which it does not have in virtue of being an X term and that this status becomes epistemically objective by means of collective intentionality. The status function of Y is not determined by the physical features of X, the collective agreement regarding this status function must be of a continued nature; the collective agreement must be continually accepted... more... - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Aardvark has done extensive research into using artificial intelligence techniques to answer questions, but the company's focus has shifted away from training machines to respond. "We wanted to let another human being answer and have the machine do the heavy lifting of indexing everybody--the tens of thousands of people who are in your extended network and all of the things that those people know," Horowitz says. The difficulty of having machines interpret meaning has forced many "semantic Web" companies to focus on niche areas, such as answers to questions about medicine. "There's a reason why all of our artificial intelligence systems only do so well with language processing tasks," Horowitz adds. "Language has much more to do with live interaction with another person--understanding context and forming a connection."" - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Unless you can train humans to only interact at a level machines can understand - then you'll have a "Semantic" web. - Cliff Gerrish

Be sure to read about how useless the data is. When format trumps data transparency, the result is a political win for a "standard" and a loss for democracy. http://www.betaversion.org/~stefan... - Cliff Gerrish

"So, for literally billions of triples, and 8,000 attributes, we have ABSOLUTELY NO INFORMATION ABOUT WHAT THE DATA CONTAINS OTHER THAN A PROPERTY LABEL. There is much, much rich value here in data.gov, but all of it remains locked up and hidden. The sad truth about this data release is that it provides absolutely no value in its current form. We lack the keys to unlock the value." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"The original specification for the work was highly selective in its choice of areas to study, and this Report addresses only three of these areas in any depth: * open science including open notebook science : making methodologies, data and results available on the Internet, through transparent working practices * citizen science including volunteer computing : where volunteers who may not have scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation * predictive science : data-driven science which enables the forecasting, anticipation or prediction of specific outcomes. Synthetic science (research which combines science and engineering methods to design and build novel biological entities), and Immersive science (used to describe research involving virtual and simulated worlds), are referenced, but require more detailed examination. Fuller definitions of the terms and areas examined in this study have been provided in Section 3. In... more... - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

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So your position is, if Bing pays WolframAlpha and gives the results away for "free" -- then infoChimps can't charge for unique data sets? - Cliff Gerrish

"I interpret these comments to mean that Google’s management still views the concept of semantic search (and the Semantic Web) as involving better understanding of the intended meaning of text in documents and queries. The W3C’s web of data model is still not on their radar." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Of course not being on their radar doesn't inhibit Google from Rich Snippets, microformats or scanning for RDFa layers. - Igor Goldkind

The question is how do they value that structured data within their algorithms. Clearly they don't take it at face value. - Cliff Gerrish