Sindice is a Semantic Web index with a search engine. . (Here is the link: sindice.com). Interestingly, one of its authors is Nova Spivack from Radar Technologies, the same guy who runs twine.com. Is this the semantic search engine twine talks about ? Sindice claims to offer semantic search for terms and properties or triples, but personally, I can hardly notice the benefit of using it - It is only capable of indexing things, it is not capable of extracting terms' relations with other terms - something the Semantic Web is about. Why would I need a semantic index or a search through that index. Probably the best application of these services would be making of semantic piped tasks. The Sigma search engine is aggregating definitions for the terms from different sources, and what I really like about it is the ability for the users to control the sources of the definitions. Sigma can export the search results in various formats, such as RDF or JSON, but I am really having hard time to see the benefits of it without getting the relations of the terms.
In general, Sindice has some fancy marketing, but what it really has under the hood remains to be seen. Personally I don't think there is much to brag about.
In general, Sindice has some fancy marketing, but what it really has under the hood remains to be seen. Personally I don't think there is much to brag about.
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2 comments:
There is a pretty major amount of technology behind sindice and Sig.ma , which indeed is flashy, is notthing but an application on top of it. Sindice is a set of APIs which allows application access to RDF, RDFa and Microformats out there, it wont go in the business of extracting relations out of thin air, it is only concerned with structured data that people put out there already. Of course it all as to prove itself yet :-) in terms of data avaiable and ability for developers to still leverage this.
No doubt about it - I agree totally, but I was wondering if it worth it to put so much effort into such technology. I am saying this because the output of it does not reveal the portion of the graph that a given term is related to, but instead it focuses on the sources that mention the given resource. A semantic web application would have little benefit from such API - semantic applications need automatic discovery and identification of entities, concepts, events and the interrelation between them in order to be able to automate some of the tasks that are performed manually today. For instance, semantic web piping of tasks will (or is) possible if machines are able to automatically identify things and see how other things are related between them. In my opinion, OpenCalais is much more useful technology and API. OpenCalais actually provides services to reveal the types, relevance and relations of raw text! Imagine if webmasters could have automatic tools to annotate the content they have - that would solve the chicken-and-the-egg problem with the Semantic Web applications and the semantic web data. I honestly hope that OpenCalais will change the Web as we know it - I do not work for them, I am just amazed of their work. It is the API.
Regarding Sindice, everything is fine, probably semantic crawlers would benefit somehow of it in future I guess, but I don't really think it will ever do major change. I am also really excited about the T2 Semantic Search Engine twine.com announces and how it will be different (read: better) from todays' text-matching search engines.
Thanks for commenting, though :-)
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