Comments on: The Semantic Web’s Tagging System http://www.altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/ The most wonderful search engines you've never seen! Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:43:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: Hope Leman http://www.altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/comment-page-1/#comment-85897 Hope Leman Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:03:04 +0000 http://altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/#comment-85897 Oops--meant "someone." Oops–meant “someone.”

]]> By: Hope Leman http://www.altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/comment-page-1/#comment-85895 Hope Leman Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:57:09 +0000 http://altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/#comment-85895 This is a fascinating discussion and one I am attempting to understand. Could somehow compare Cognition with: http://altsearchengines.com/2008/07/31/the-true-knowledge-answer-machine/ in terms of the underlying technologies and performance? I very much enjoy Dr. Dahlgren's disquisitions on this site. As I read the responses, it seems to me that they don't really address Dr. Dahlgren's point that tagging systems, however multifaceted and easy to use they may be, are simply too labor intensive and unstandardized to be of practicable or lasting value. Or I am wrong here, gentlemen? Anyway, you are all obviously brilliant people and whatever you all can do to improve search, more power to you. This is a fascinating discussion and one I am attempting to understand.

Could somehow compare Cognition with:

http://altsearchengines.com/2008/07/31/the-true-knowledge-answer-machine/

in terms of the underlying technologies and performance?

I very much enjoy Dr. Dahlgren’s disquisitions on this site. As I read the responses, it seems to me that they don’t really address Dr. Dahlgren’s point that tagging systems, however multifaceted and easy to use they may be, are simply too labor intensive and unstandardized to be of practicable or lasting value. Or I am wrong here, gentlemen?

Anyway, you are all obviously brilliant people and whatever you all can do to improve search, more power to you.

]]> By: Andrew McKnight http://www.altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/comment-page-1/#comment-85660 Andrew McKnight Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:28:49 +0000 http://altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/#comment-85660 I agree that if you can extract semantics from natural language you avoid an incredible amount of tagging work and can do some amazing things, but despite that I disagree with much of what you said. "...[Tagging] requires a broad consensus amongst users and content creators...". Do you mean that they need to agree upon which tags to use in the vocabulary? If so, this shouldn't a problem if you offer a very large number of tags that are descriptive enough, though it may be difficult. "A typical way of accessing tags is to offer users a menu of choices for values of the tags. Unfortunately, this creates more work and inefficiency. Also, it injects a certain amount of subjectivity into to the process because the content creator or manager is the arbiter of which tags will or will not be used." This isn't necessarily true either. If tags are generated through non-subjective means with mass collaboration. "Words are disambiguated within the context of how they are used, so “price” meaning “consequences of an action” would not be retrieved in response to a query about “price” meaning “monetary cost”." To get the context you require, your natural language tags would probably need to be at least a full sentence long, if not longer. Tags can have disambiguation associated with them. My co-workers have created <a href="http://www.entitydescriber.org/" rel="nofollow">Entity Describer</a>, which uses Freebase topics as tags, and is an example of how these problems can be solved with semantic tags. Freebase can be edited by anyone and is very large with disambiguation built in. I agree that if you can extract semantics from natural language you avoid an incredible amount of tagging work and can do some amazing things, but despite that I disagree with much of what you said.

“…[Tagging] requires a broad consensus amongst users and content creators…”. Do you mean that they need to agree upon which tags to use in the vocabulary? If so, this shouldn’t a problem if you offer a very large number of tags that are descriptive enough, though it may be difficult.

“A typical way of accessing tags is to offer users a menu of choices for values of the tags. Unfortunately, this creates more work and inefficiency. Also, it injects a certain amount of subjectivity into to the process because the content creator or manager is the arbiter of which tags will or will not be used.” This isn’t necessarily true either. If tags are generated through non-subjective means with mass collaboration.

“Words are disambiguated within the context of how they are used, so “price” meaning “consequences of an action” would not be retrieved in response to a query about “price” meaning “monetary cost”.” To get the context you require, your natural language tags would probably need to be at least a full sentence long, if not longer. Tags can have disambiguation associated with them.

My co-workers have created Entity Describer, which uses Freebase topics as tags, and is an example of how these problems can be solved with semantic tags. Freebase can be edited by anyone and is very large with disambiguation built in.

]]> By: Kingsley Idehen http://www.altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/comment-page-1/#comment-85647 Kingsley Idehen Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:36:33 +0000 http://altsearchengines.com/2008/08/05/the-semantic-web%e2%80%99s-tagging-system/#comment-85647 The issue isn't about searching opaque web pages and then emitting nicer looking, or more coherent, opaque web pages. The issue is about exposing the structured data behind the nice looking opaque web pages, giving us the option to use our cognitive skills to view the data behind the pages differently i.e. mutliple views of the same thing. RDF and Linked Data [1] facilitate what I describe above. Cognition needs a little increment in the form of exposing it's intelligent insights in strucutured data form using dereferencable URIs [2] for each of the entities that comprise it's analysis graphs. Again, it's not about smarter opaque web pages from search engines that apply semantic search inside (no matter how sophisticated the NLP may be). It's about transparent access to the data entities in the smart output (web page). Links: 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_URIs 3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8062 4. http://ode.openlinksw.com/ The issue isn’t about searching opaque web pages and then emitting nicer looking, or more coherent, opaque web pages. The issue is about exposing the structured data behind the nice looking opaque web pages, giving us the option to use our cognitive skills to view the data behind the pages differently i.e. mutliple views of the same thing.

RDF and Linked Data [1] facilitate what I describe above.

Cognition needs a little increment in the form of exposing it’s intelligent insights in strucutured data form using dereferencable URIs [2] for each of the entities that comprise it’s analysis graphs.

Again, it’s not about smarter opaque web pages from search engines that apply semantic search inside (no matter how sophisticated the NLP may be). It’s about transparent access to the data entities in the smart output (web page).

Links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_URIs
3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8062
4. http://ode.openlinksw.com/

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