I wish more people would include the transcribed text of podcast they make or reference? IS that expensive to do or something?

Although in fairness I guess he didn't get as much traction as Al Gore did for doing the same thing.

To me the promise of the Semantic Web is simply Freedom. That's with a captiol "F" like actor Mel Gibson sreamed out at the end of Braveheart.

All the world's data, be it brilliant white papers about cancer cures or LOLCATS, is currently trapped in fortress. These fortresses make you sign -up for an account at best, pay for the "privilege" to access the data at worst.

An open, read write network of the world's data would let us all get thing done, and not worry about whether or not I have the latest version of .NET installed locally on my computer. We have a duty to free the world's knowledge and let future generations look back and say "thanks" ( As opposed to "WTF is an ActiveX plug-in and why do I have to have it in order to read this historical document!?!?" )

Again, take my childish interpretation for what its worth ( $0.02 ) and read more at Wikipedia or right here on this blog.

Traditional computer technologies focus on processing data. Semantic Web technologies focus on processing metadata. The metadata is processed using ontologies. Ontologies define the relationships, the rules and the logic that apply to the metadata.

Using Semantic Web technologies, metadata is given a well-defined meaning enabling computers to process higher-level “knowledge” about the data.

For example, the statement "John is the son of William" if defined in a genealogical ontology would allow the system to infer an additional relationship - William is the father of John.

Counting results in a query language is basic functionality. Imagine if SQL was lacking a count operator, you'd never be able to count the total rows given some criteria.

no matter how fine the mesh, human consciousness will be more subtle, and having a lot of the grunt work conceptualization taken care of machine-wise will reallyt allow this to become obvious...

the genome guys thought for a few minutes they got to the fundamental building blocks, and found that, no way, there was so much more at subtler levels that it only increased the questions...

same with the semantic web thing...

the danger? algorithms taken as reality, in the same way your insurance sx canceled by a computer because of some obscure programmer's decision

anyway, it is going to arrive sooner rather than later, after all, technology is just the out-picturing on the material plane of the natural and inherent abilities of consciousness, and we haven't even gotten to first base

enjoy, gregory

To achieve the real goal of semantic web, you need to practically solve AI. The current NLP and ML techniques are very limited and not scalable, as language model building is still pretty much an art. We'll probably see some very primitive SemWeb stuff in English (forget about other languages) soon. It'll still be unimpressive and not that useful, compared with just full text web search from Google etc.

The prime time for semantic web is "now" + 5 years, with "now" a moving variable.

I don't think it's 'confused', so much as demonstrating the broad range of purposes to which semantic technologies can be put. You can talk to lots of people, all of whom see benefits in semantic technology. But there are so many potential benefits that you'll tend to just hear about their own (sometimes narrow) area of interest rather than seeing the whole picture.

Alex Iskold, for example, is using semantic technologies in his products over at AdaptiveBlue. Those products are very different from our Talis Platform ( www.talis.com/platform/ ), so his corporate view of SemWeb advantages would be very different from ours. It doesn't mean he's wrong and we're right, or vice versa.

There are a growing number of companies investing heavily (Reuters with Clearforest for one) in deploying semantic technology, whether in whole new applications like Radar Networks' Twine or (perhaps more likely?) behind the scenes in longer term enhancements to mission critical core infrastructure.

With the exception of consumer offerings such as Twine, most end users will probably never 'see' the Semantic Web, and nor should they. They applications they use will 'simply' get smarter.

For the people building those applications, infrastructure such as that we're investing in with the Talis Platform is intended to make it easier to get started, and easier to gain the benefits of the Semantic Web without having to go further into its arcana than they might wish.

In general, the magic happens with the Ontological relationships defined between these tags (which can be an immense amount of data), and the different triggers and responses that can be programmed in algorithms according to such ontological relationships.

I'm no Semantic expert yet, and I'm only here to learn more, but my guess is that eventually robust Semantic applications will be able to be plugged into play by software developers. They'll be able to plug in a particular Ontological tree set and plug in a particular Natural Language Processing algorithm set and connect the two. The natural language processing algorithm would essentially connect different actions users use to the words used in the ontological tree, ultimately delivering responses to, say, a user in a social network based on HIS actions.

If there are some experts out there, I'd love it if they "correct me if I'm wrong."

James
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