I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN: Rensselaer Polytech Tetherless World Constellation researchers are working on a software development tool kit they hope will help usher in the Semantic Web, an approach proposes to create a more intelligent Internet infrastructure that can assign meaning to the concepts being searched and, to some degree, have an understanding of the researcher's intent.
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The Internet grew out of an idea to connect various and disparate sources of data, delivering to researchers around the globe unprecedented access to information via their computer screens. As e-Science evolves alongside Web 2.0, however, some are pushing for a fundamental change in the way the Internet catalogues and organizes data to make it more readily available to the growing number of interdisciplinary and highly specialized researchers who spend their working hours nearly entirely online and who tend to collaborate online. Whereas this is not a new argument—the idea of a more intuitive "Semantic Web" has been kicked around for years—it has gotten a fresh set of legs thanks to the recent funding of a software development tool kit expected to better connect researchers with the information they seek.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., $1.1 million in October to create a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that scientists and other researchers will be able to use to make data from their work available to a larger number of their peers as well as laypeople, including educators and policymakers. The money is being provided as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Newer generations of researchers not schooled in more traditional, library-based (pre-Internet) research methods are used to doing keyword searches on the Internet to discover information. "But if you come from outside a given field, you don't necessarily know what those keywords are," says Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard University astronomy professor. A Semantic Web setup would enable researchers to craft their queries in more natural language. Goodman adds, however, that a fully semantic Web that can read, comprehend and categorize information beyond keywords requires a level of artificial intelligence that is currently not available, something Rensselaer's researchers are trying to address with this new tool kit.
"Earth and space science research today is moving online," says Tom Narock, a faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and at NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center. Narock often searches (for his research on solar physics) for measurements taken by spacecraft, data that is typically stored and managed by multiple research institutions. "The problem is there's a lot of heterogeneity among the different data sets," he says. If he needs to study images of the sun over a specific time period, Narock needs to first find out which spacecraft are taking the images, whether they were in position to take the photos he needs, and whether they were operational during a specific time period, for example. Although many research institutes espouse the idea of open access to their work, finding the right information takes quite a bit of trial and error, he adds.
This is in part because different organizations often store their data using one or more of a variety of data formats. "There's also a deeper semantic issue than what do the columns and rows actually represent in different databases," Narock says. As a result, sifting through different data sources in search of related information can be a very tedious task, where a researcher needs to go to individual databases and inspect files, sometimes even calling fellow researchers for clarification.
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16 Comments
Add Comment"Such a conversion won't be easy, though. As Narock points out, people in charge of massive databases would have to develop ontologies that make the information more accessible"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYep, good luck with that :-)
Hmmm, fb36, if it isn't easy, we shouldn't even try....?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that lots of great tools and ideas fail when they smack up against a huge ingrained legacy infrastructure that is highly resistant or expensive to change.
But people keep making good tools and strong efforts, and sometimes they take hold and things get better... this is the nature of progress. Pretty much every advance we have had has smacked into some kind of wall of resistance, but eventually took hold through luck, persistance, timing, or just changing social environment.
So I'm clearly not a fan of just brushing off efforts at progress just because you are cynical and the road looks a bit tough.... but good luck with that worldview! :-)
"The Semantic Web has it's own query language that takes advantage of meanings of concepts and their relationships," Narock says.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"it's"? Either Narock or the editors at Sciam seem to have their own language as well. I suspect Sciam since we see no [sic].
I am sure
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow exactly could it be Narock's fault for the improper spelling of "it's" seeing that he is quoted in the article. You may be afine copy editor one day, but CSI will not be knocking down your door anytime soon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is clear that adding semantic ontology support to any large databases will take lots of time (=money).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all the organization created that data does not really need semantic support because they already know what data exactly represents and how to use it.
So all the extra time and money must be spent solely for other researchers looking for data in the Internet, just as a favor?
For this to work it should provide important benefits to the owners of the data. I don't think it is really the case.
I like the idea of having a toolkit. I think there are apps that already do that such as TopBraid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure the technology has a lot of potential, but I think the the harder part is converting all the web designers/programmers to infuse this technology in their systems. This involves getting domain experts to model the data and developers to learn this new technology.
@fb36 - agree with you, it's really hard to get data owners to understand and see value in it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think a lot of systems are barely even kept up with little or no money, how does one expect it to convert its schema into an ontology.
Like most of the posters above, I'm doubtful this thing will work.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSaying that, it's still worth the attempt. Good luck Rensselaer, you'll need it.
The system you describe in this article has already been built. It is a free site which learns and unlearns ontologies and then uses them as a search entity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis system has already been built. It is a private project which has been going on for over ten years. www.alexlib.info. It is free and has a vast scope.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHalf of what they talk about doing involves databases and datasets and columns and rows ... a fine use for semantic web technology. The other half involves a level of semantic natural language processing not exhibited anywhere yet ... and they don't have a single linguist involved in the project. They might have a chance at completing the first half of their vision, but as for the rest? It's like asking rocket scientists to do brain surgery -- both are smart and well-trained, but only within their own field.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It's" nice to see positive comments countering the negitive folks out there. This seems like a very worthwhile concept and probably will develop into a useful tool/s.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy so pessimistic? I think this will work great. It is only a matter of time until database people and developers will give up their current level of abstraction that they are comfortable with and use ontologies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also agree with Buck that success of this project strongly depends on linguistic studies. Whatever the controlled vocabularies or semantics are, they are understood and shared with people using natural language.
What may, in all likelihood, emerge from this Semantic Web experiment, is a prolonged period of debate amongst academics (those who typically define the semantics within their respective fields) over "semantics"....the meanings of concepts and words in their particular brand of jargon...this will probably be most pronounced in the humanities and "soft" sciences (sociology, psychology, etc.), but will even occur (to varying degrees) amongst the hard sciences who frequently use variations of word-concepts and disagree over meanings. definitions, and values (e.g., the value of an exponent in an equation)...which anyone who regularly reads papers in Nature or Science can attest to....A "toolkit", no matter how sophisticated, must still be compiled by humans, who tend to spend endless hours debating the meanings of word, concepts, and technical terms (just peruse the user group blogs)....my guess is that the good folks at Rensselaer will be requesting more money from ARRA within the next 18 months. Finally, let's hope that the post-modernist and "deconstructionist" folks don't get involved in the early stages of this game, otherwise, it will never happen (not in our lifetime).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf semantic web becomes a reality, it would take all the charm away from researching on the net as anyone and everyone would get quick results about whatever they want.
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