Today I read about the latest try to fulfill the famous Web Dream: The Semantic Search Engine. Wouldn't it be nice to have such a wonderful tool, that can actually understand you ? You can ask it about anything, it is the Global Mind, it crunches data and comprehends the whole Web, the largest knowledge management application humanity has ever built. And the best thing is, it learns and gets smarter with every day... by itself.
Sounds like a quote from a Science Fiction book, but is it that far ? It's been about 10 years since the publication of the famous paper in Scientific American by Tim Berners Lee, but yet no (r)evolution has occured. There is no single killer application, fueled by the Semantic Technologies. But why ?
The whole computer industry lives for roughly 60 years, the Internet era has begun in the 1990s, so a period of 10 years means a lot of time for the Web. That is huge amount of time. We have the standards, we have the tools, we have the frameworks, the knowledge ...
I have read several articles and it seems there is a logical explanation of this phenomenon: it's the humans that are wrong... (again). It's not the problem in making machines undersand what we mean (personally I think it sounds like the most exciting part when telling someone what is the Semantic Web all about: computers will undersand ? Really ? Like in the movies ? Will I be able to ask them via voice control ? ). The trouble is that people are lazy. The WWW is the biggest and the fastest growing entity on the whole planet. It is enormous. People will need extra effort to annotate all that data across the web. But it is tedious and time-consuming (Hey, didn't we invent computers because of that ?). But it's they that don't understand, not the machines. Machines are ready to learn. Another issue for that would come from the fact that humans are spoiled and selfish - people lie. Yes, they do. There is no rightful force to make webmasters embed true information about their web pages. (Remember the keyword stuffing problem ? ). How will someone even make them want to start annotating the pages ? I believe that here lie most of the problems for the stagnation of the Semantic Web and its applications.
There are efforts to automate the process through Natural Language Processing(NLP) but I wonder if it ever reaches the desired level of automation. Here is a good article about what Oracle does : Oracle & OpenCalais - Semantic Database. This thing really makes me happy because of the burst of hope that the Semantic Web is not an e-Myth.
Back to the search engines. The team of Twine.com has been busy trying to achieve the unimaginable: produce a true Semantic Search Engine. Here is the original post I found T2 - Twine's Semantic Search Engine. If this becomes true, all the hype will disappear in the mist. I understand why people are sceptical, but presonally, guys, you don't know what might happen. Maybe it is possible. Requirements are high - a volatile system, evolving every second, reasoning and comprehending, accurate, fast, robust ... but there is still a chance. The Semantic Engine is the one of the most desired applications of the Semantic Web. It will be a major breakthrough - although many find it tough to believe. Will the openess and sharing prevail at the end ?
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