July 18, 2006

Comments on TBL's AAAI '06 Presenation / Q&A

This is an interesting but somewhat negative write-up from Nick Montfort of Grand Text Auto: Google’s Norvig Questions Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web.

A question from Andrew McCallum about using probabalistic approaches in the semweb is also discussed.

May 22, 2004

The Vision Thing

Paul Ford wrote in his XML.com article covering WWW2004:

... But in the short term, while no one can fully agree on what the Semantic Web is, the need for a clearly articulated vision is of essence in order to move the Semantic Web further. It is surprising to see that its leading evangelist is also uncertain as to whether Semantic Web's immediate destiny is on the server or the desktop. Source.

Invention all starts with a very personal vision about how to solve a problem, followed by months of grueling work -- work make easier by exploiting available standards, tools, and ideas. I see the W3C, perl, apache, linux, and other open developer communities as the great givers of standards, tools, and ideas of our time. But they are catalysts, not drivers.

While I am skeptical of vision -- often found in the businesses and their feeder communities, I do enjoy and benefit from absorbing the visions of leaders such as Tim Berners Lee. But a "big idea" such as the semantic web does not need a clearly articulated vision to become widely adopted.

What it needs is what we already have.

March 27, 2004

SKOS 1.0 Released

SWAD-Europe has announced the availability of SKOS-Core 1.0. Accoding to the guide, the Simple Knowledge Organization System is designed to support the definition of words and the association between words and phrases. One intended use for SKOS is in RDF thesauri.

SKOS-Core allows you to define concepts and concept schemes. A concept is any unit of thought that can be defined or described. A concept scheme is a collection of concepts.

A concept may have any number of attached labels. A label is any word, phrase or symbol that can be used to refer to the concept by people. A concept may have only one preferred label, and any number of alternative labels.

Relationships may be defined between concepts within the same concept scheme. Any such relationship is referred to here as a semantic relation.

Mappings may be defined between concepts from different concept schemes. Any such mapping is referred to here as a semantic mapping. Source