The Tetherless World Weblog

Just saw Jim’s post on What is the Semantic Web really all about?

I have been wondering about this problem too. What is Semantic Web? Yesterday I have asked a question “Why few (or none?) Web 2.0 sites provide hierarchical tagging?” on LinkedIn and get some pretty good answers:

http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=496785&askerID=14212719

For your convenience, I attached my LinkedIn post at the end of this blog.

There are two things in the answers that draw my attention:
* Many do _not_ believe tags, or even hierarchical tags, are semantic; “semantics” means RDF or triples at least to them;
* Some believe that even implementing a hierarchical tagging system is not easy in engineering or social aspects.

I think these two beliefs, among many other reasons, may explain in part why the “Semantic Web” is still far from a reality. The first is about the overestimation of what is “semantics”: triple is one way to express semantics, but it is a question that whether it is _the_ way. The second is about the underestimation of “Web”-scale: realizing a knowledge system, even if is conceptually “simple”,  on the Web can lead to serious scalability problems, both for machine (can you make <1s response for all queries?) and for people (on changing their way of thinking).

Here is what I believe about “semantic web” (note no-capitalization). First, it is not necessarily “the Semantic Web” (just like there is no “the Mobile Web”), as defined by W3C standards or the layered cake model. Semantics is a way of organizing things, RDF and OWL are some ways to express it, but other ways should be encouraged too and sometime work better. Second, tools and services should be “web-ish”, something like a semanticized version of youtube or gmail; after all, “web users” are rarely a bioinformatician or can master a Java-based ontology editor.  Third, start deployment with very very basic semantics like trees (yeah, I know some will protest) and sameAs, but do it in a very very efficient way - if we can’t even come up with a Web-efficient tree reasoner, then how realistic we can come up with a Web-efficient RDF or OWL reasoner?

Now I’m prepared to dodge tomatoes :D

by Jie Bao

===============

My original post on LinkedIn (reorganized a bit)

Why few (or none?) Web 2.0 sites provide hierarchical tagging?

Gmail label and delicious tagging are flat, which is troublesome all the time for me. I have to add (unnecessarily) many tags even if they can be easily inferred. I didn’t find an alternative that allows me to organize my tags in a tree or network. Is there any technical or marketing reason?

People have been talking about semantic web a for a while and are looking for a killer app. It’s apparent that hierarchical tagging is semantic, is in high demand, and is relatively easy to do. Why there is none in popular sites?

PS 1: Let me clarify some situations when hierarchical tagging will save me a lot of time: recently I’m reading a book of Qian Mu, a historian, and tagging my notes on delicious with tags “qianmu“; I also want all those notes be tagged with “history“, but I have to always add both “qianmu” and “history”.

Sometimes I want more than one tags to be inferred. For example, when I add “wuxu” (the year of 1898), I want tags “qing“, “china” and “reform” to be added. You will find how trouble it is to add all 4 tags together when you have about 10 notes on “wuxu”.

In another example, I want to share my tags in both Chinese and English. If I can define two subclass relations between two tags, each in a different language, I will not have to always add the both tags.

Now I have about 1000 tags on delicious. I’m really really in despair need for a hierarchy. I’m willing to pay delicious $100 for such a service.

PS 2: Further clarification: I don’t believe I will need a tagging system that always requires me to pick up terms from a tree, DAG, or a network. I can still freely add tags. But I need some way to clean up my tags from time to time, and organize them. It is just like how i clean up my “download” folder: put them into different folders, and if a folder is too big make some subfolders.

The twittering of #semtech2009 got me pretty frustrated - seems like the “big O” Ontology story was way too prevalent, and while linked data had a good showing, the relationships between linking and ontologies seemed to be forgotten a lot.  It motivated me to write up some thoughts on this on my Nature blog site in a blog entry entitled “What is the Semantic Web really all about” -- I look forward to your comments there or here…

Jim H

For those interested, I kept a twitter log of my daughter’s graduation — but did it in haiku to make it more interesting — slightly edited and cleaned up - here’s what I’ve got.

Graduation in Haiku

Parents wait and wait
Students anxious in the hall
Commencement is nigh

Pomp and Circumstance
Way too many caps and gowns
precess slowly by

Chairman of trustees
welcomes all to the event
when will he be done?

President makes jokes
then he gets more serious
“we need your money!”

Now they proceed to
honorary doctorates
lots of famous folks

(someone sends a text
it’s a message from my kid:
“Get me out of here!”)

juris causus doc
no one has heard of this guy
must be a donor

Commencement address
starts with funny anecdote
so what else is new?

Speaker’s really good!
Words of hope and cheer - too bad:
grads are all asleep

Cannot see my kid
the talks all go on too long
will it ever end?

A problem with this:
seeing your kid get her degree
means watching the rest

The Prez says the words
the crowd stands up, cheers real loud
kids now have B.A.s

Alma mater sung
speeches made, degrees conferred
graduation’s done

I saw a webinar demo of Wolfram|Alpha given by Stephen Wolfram today — the system is very impressive — (you can read my blog about it on the Nature Network)

One thought struck me - we’re trying to do open-linked data, while what Wolfram has is an impressive engine that uses the “closed” knowledge that lets them do curation, testing and computation.  Sort of like open social networks vs. the many specialized ones — still, he shows what is possible with data and a good computational engine, and I think that will be generally good for all of us “data on the web” types.

(Jim H.)

For whatever reason, I’ve recently been asked several time about my quote “A little semantics goes a long way” - I sent a long email answer to one of these, and then realized I could make it into a web page to point people at should this come up again — so for those of you looking for a little light background reading, and interested, enjoy.  http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/LittleSemanticsWeb.html