The Tetherless World Weblog

During the last centuries, humankind has experimented an exponential increase in the information available. This is even more perceptible in the Web, which makes information to be reached with just a few clicks….. far beyond what we as humans can process and assimilate.

Thus we need to discriminate among a gargantuan amount of information available to find wha are we looking for (or the closest to it). The traditional Information Retrieval idea for this is based on searching keywords. However, it is difficult to differentiate among several –potentially billions– of pages which has more useful information to what we are looking for. In order to do that, we need to discriminate. The general idea of discriminate is based on the concept of ranking(*): This is an order (whether partial or total) of some entities based on a set of criteria.

This is a good way of handling information because we don’t have the resources (time, memory, etc..) to navigate through all the available data. And that is exactly what Google does: we ask “I need to find some pages that contains keywords X, Y and Z” and Google answers “Look, according to my algorithm and the data I have here is a list order from what I think is the most relevant page for your query”.

The Semantic Web brings similar challenges, but in this case we are not talking about pages and links, but about any entity (people, cars, webpages, ontologies) related by different predicates (people has firends, cars has parts, webpages has authors, ontologies describe other entities and so on). Thus the problem is far more complex, since there is more information available.

Also, there are other questions we can ask: What ontology should I choose for a certain work, given dozens of possible candidates? When using that ontology if I have a SPARQL query that returns 1e6 results, are they all equally interesting to me? If not, which ones to show first?

The idea of opening your data, share it, mash it up, makes it everything more complex: It is not enough to have millions of answers, as a user I want the best suited for me (whatever that means).

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Alvaro Graves

(*) Linguistic thought: Is interesting for a spanish native speaker as me that there is not translation for “ranking”: Does it means that the concept didn’t exist in the spanish-speaking world?