Semantic Web, NON-technically speaking

Semantic Web in Context Segment at TLT Center “Web2.0 Day” Eric Hoffer Second Integral at Seton Hall July 16, 2008

Agenda

About me

Your focus on Web2.0

Versions of the Web, relatively speaking

The Semantic Web or Web3.0

What does it have to do with you

So, about me marketing, strategy, people, processes, puzzles, tools, usability, products, productivity… research, analytics, financial markets, work, the world, people… living and doing their jobs discovery – information – connecting - its about helping real people living and doing their work unlock “SME-tise” and enable the many

me (one more thing)… I’m interested in lots of different things... Visual Usability Running Value Networks Finance me

me (one more thing)… I’m interested in lots of different things... particularly where they interact…

me (one more thing)… I’m interested in lots of different things... particularly where they interact… and in their outer reaches…

me (one more thing)… I’m interested in lots of different things... particularly where they interact… and in their outer reaches… in the interstices - where they overlap. Biology and Anthropology System Dynamics and Economics Usability and Value Networks As you might experience with:

Interstices Why am I telling you this? To me, this is what semantic technologies and the Semantic Web are about. Enabling the crossing of lines, bridging gaps, unlocking expertise, getting things done… for people.

Technical aspects…

There’s all sorts of technical details, but let’s just get some context

Web Progression

Web (original) – Pages and Links

Web2.0

Web3.0

(apologies in advance for using a version-type naming scheme – which doesn’t really exist).

Web (original, Web1.0) - about

About companies showing their stuff

And about people finding the stuff

Web1.0 (links) (Image borrowed from Josh Bancroft’s tinyscreenfuls.com)

This is the view as far as the machine is concerned

Web Progression

Web1.0 – Pages and Links

Web2.0

Web3.0

Web Progression

Web1.0 – Pages and Links (static, proprietary, no user contribution, and technical)

Web2.0

Web3.0

Web Progression

Web2.0 – Participatory

Web3.0

Web2.0 - about

About people taking part in the web,

sharing ideas, opinions, creations…

and others taking advantage and enjoying

using the web as a platform to deliver or piece together capabilities

Web2.0 – elements

rating/reviewing

sharing

collaborating

socializing

blogging

pull

tagging

mashing

Web1.0  2.0 (how?)

Under the hood, XML brought “structure” to web pages,

by separating people-bound information from computer-bound formatting instructions,

companies and services could now provide wrappers - into which, people just fill in their own content.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleur-design

Web2.0 – examples

rating/reviewing – amazon, ebay…

sharing – flickr, youtube…

collaborating – wikis, google docs…

socializing – myspace, facebook, linkedin…

blogging – typepad, blogger, wordpress…

pull – RSS, ATOM

tagging – delicious, zigtag…

mashing – google maps…

Web2.0 (reviews, rating, tagging)

Web Progression

Web2.0 – Participatory

Web3.0

Web Progression

Web2.0 – Participatory (dynamic, contributive, connecting, interactive, and easy)

Web3.0

Great stuff, Web2.0. So what’s missing?

XML separated complexity of presentation layer from content, BUT didn’t structure the content (text and data).

So, computers can’t tell one word from another, nor differentiate between different meanings of a word. (e.g. “orange”…).

Therefore, computers still couldn’t help us to get better answers, (just nicer looking ones that might be close to what we ask about).

Enter, the S emantic W eb,

or semantic web, Web3.0…

"Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

(Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web , Scientific American, May 2001)

Web3.0/Semantic Web – about

If Web2.0 is for “people” (being part of it and connecting between each other and things),

Web3.0 is for “machines” (and connections between data - for the benefit of people).

Web3.0/Semantic Web – about

Adding granularity to what is on the page,

to enable identification and classification of items (people, places, things, events) on page –

so the computer can help find the right pages, to grab the right data, mix things together in like terms...

Web Progression

Web1.0 – Pages and Links (static, non-interactive, non-dynamic, and technical)

Web3.0 –Semantic. Interlinking. Relative.

Web Progression

Web1.0 – Pages and Links (static, non-interactive, non-dynamic, and technical)

Web3.0 –Semantic. Interlinking. Relative. (compatibility for data interoperability – to intelligently get to answers)

BUT HOW, and to what end?

Remember all those Web 2.0 things? Well 3.0 is the same stuff, but enhanced with contextual information.

Relatively easy in closed environment – mapping to likely choices – but out in the wild is another story.

Consider simple tagging – In context can reveal more.

And mashing - Think APIs – but on a really broad scale.

Mashing

Sharing + Tagging + Mapping See live example

Isn’t all that just Web2.0? What’s the Semantic Web part?

contextualization and meaning

draw logical conclusions (inferencing)

digest natural language (NLP)

comply with W3C Standards (more later)

…

Web3.0

From the outside, it is – or rather, should be, just enhanced experience for the user

Fewer and better search results

Actual answers to questions

Information from different resources being dynamically pulled together and provided to you in common terms.

Web2.0  3.0 – how?

Under the hood of the transition this time…

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/suzanneandsimon Adding granularity to the people-bound portion of what is on the page – so the computer can use it to help us do those things.

Web2.0  3.0 – how?

Somewhat technically speaking, this means:

Interpreting text/data

Classifying it

Using discovered classification to steer through relationships between terms

Traversing relationships to iteratively form subsequent inquiry

“ Semagically” getting just what you want

What about the Semantic Web jargon?

URIs – (uniform resource identifiers) each and every “thing” has a standard name and a permanent place to be referenced

RDF and OWL – language and syntax to describe relationships between things – (incl: ontologies)

Reasoners – systems like Pellet use formal logic to infer or draw conclusions based relationships (father’s brother is uncle…)

GRDDL – gleans and extracts rdf data from web pages

SPARQL – language for asking questions (querying) and receiving answers of semantically compliant data.

Remember this slide?

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar">

<ex:editor>

<rdf:Description>

<ex:homePage>

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://purl.org/net/dajobe/">

</rdf:Description>

</ex:homePage>

</rdf:Description>

</ex:editor>

</rdf:Description>

<ex:editor>

<rdf:Description>

<ex:fullName>Dave Beckett</ex:fullName>

</rdf:Description>

</ex:editor>

</rdf:Description>

<dc:title>RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)</dc:title>

</rdf:Description>

Remember this slide?

<ex:editor>

<rdf:Description>

<ex:homePage>

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://purl.org/net/dajobe/">

</rdf:Description>

</ex:homePage>

</rdf:Description>

</ex:editor>

</rdf:Description>

<ex:editor>

<rdf:Description>

<ex:fullName>Dave Beckett</ex:fullName>

</rdf:Description>

</ex:editor>

</rdf:Description>

<dc:title>RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)</dc:title>

</rdf:Description>

This is the granular form. But SW folks now get that regular people brought in via web2.0 won’t write this. So don’t worry about it.

For those who live in spreadsheets

One way to think of this granularity is with a spreadsheet -

Row of items implies relationship between items, (columns are characteristics)

OK to repeat data in multiple rows, but better to reference one “real” item (repeats would be references too)

Item changes. Everything pointing to it reflects change

… like collapsing redundant data into a single named entity, and explicitly defining the relationships between the columns.

See animation

Web2>3 Let’s go back to tagging (tag clouds) See Del.icio.us

Combine

Visualize

Weight

Emphasize

Focus

Emerge

Expose

Discover

Web2>3 (clustering) See ZigTag site

NLP and Entity Extraction (using Calais) Try this live by going to http://sws.clearforest.com/calaisviewer/ In this example we discussed Calais using natural language processing to “read” text submissions, re-displaying with items marked and classified. We then considered how this can enable asking the web questions on a grand scale, and tabulation of results of NLP from millions of pages.

… applied to blogging (e.g. Zemanta or Tagaroo) See live example In this example we looked at how the Zemanta plug-in “reads” a blog post while you are writing it, and provides images and links for you to include in the post – based on its “sense” that these are related to what you are writing.

… embedding semantics (e.g. using SIOC)

If you want to get into the weeds a bit

Behind the scenes at the “semantic web” companies you’ve probably heard of – like:

Metaweb’s Freebase

Radar Networks’ Twine

Soon-to-be Microsoft’s Powerset…

it is all about named entities, classes and type data - and these services, while not making it so apparent, are trying to build this (whereas Google is, at least outwardly, more about statistical ranking – likelihood of meaning).

See Trueknowledge at http://beta.trueknowledge.com/ and try finding an entity (person, place, event, thing…) and try out “Add Knowledge” to see the process of unambiguous entry.

Linking Data (global scale – possibilities emerge) Source: DERI http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

Progression from 50,000 feet

Technical overview

Web Science Source: WSRI - http:// webscience.org /

Other links and examples http://webscience.org/ and http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http:// sws.clearforest.com/calaisviewer / http://wiki.dbpedia.org and http://deri.org/ and http://sioc-project.org/ http://www.talis.com/platform/podcasts http:// danbri.org / http:// mashmaker.intel.com /web/ - learning masher http:// beta.trueknowledge.com http://www.readwriteweb.com/ (e.g archives/trueknowledge_demo.php) http:// healthmap.org /en and http:// tagmaps.research.yahoo.com /