Semantic Web technology will be at the heart of the new software tool kit, says Peter Fox, a Rensselaer physics professor and a co-chair of the school's Tetherless World Constellation research team spearheading the project. (At Rensselaer, "constellations" are multidisciplinary teams of senior faculty, junior faculty, graduate students and undergraduates.) "With the new tool kit, the idea is for us to get out and train communities and create a shared resource," Fox says. "This is a tool for e-Science," which is essentially the open collaboration among different scientific disciplines across interconnected networks.
Rather than offering researchers a simple keyword search across a single database that returns information in pieces, the semantic approach proposes to create a more intelligent Internet infrastructure that can assign meaning to the concepts being searched and even to some degree have an understanding of the researcher's intent. Using ontologies, which are formal representations of concepts within a particular discipline and of the relationships among these concepts, searches could understand different nomenclatures that express the same ideas, providing links to related Web sites, nonprofit organizations, upcoming bills before Congress, and even multimedia podcasts, digital images and video files. "The semantic Web is the way of coming up with a shared expression for a common meaning," Fox says.
Ideally, researchers and Web surfers alike will also have the ability to review and correct information when necessary, similar to Wikipedia's model. Access to certain data sets could also be controlled using semantic tags attached to the data, helping those searching for the information to more easily credit the original creator of the data that they are using, whereas data creators could track exactly who is looking at their data, says Deborah McGuinness, a Rensselaer professor of computer science and cognitive science as well as a co-chair of the school's Tetherless World Constellation. Fox and McGuinness are developing the tool kit with the help of fellow Tetherless World co-chair and Rensselaer computer and cognitive sciences professor, Jim Hendler.
A semantic interface would allow a researcher to visit a single research site, describe the information required, and then let ontology and semantics take care of the rest. "The Semantic Web has it's own query language that takes advantage of meanings of concepts and their relationships," Narock says. "You ask your question at very high level, and it takes care of filling in the details for you."
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, although Fox says Constellation's plan is to have some prepackaged ontologies for programmers to use. To make the Semantic Web work, Narock says, tools such as the one Constellation is developing need to be widely available and, just as importantly, used as data is created.
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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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