::scr semantic

[jo walsh]

> Small semantic weblets (intrasemanticwebs? :-) might work out, since they 
> then work like distributed Prolog systems, but nobody's yet found a way to 
> make it scale to a global system.

that begets the question, is an integrated global system desirable, rather
than is it feasible? there are interesting ways of doing search, discovery
and navigation in distributed metadata storage; i'd especially refer you
to http://www.neurogrid.net/Decentralized_Meta-Data_Strategies-neat.html 
  
> Problems include the fact that one group of 
> people might start publishing tuples of the form "fancies(<url of 
> Alaric>,<url of Anna Paquin>)" while another might be publishing 
> "wants-to-snog(<....>,<...>)", which are interchangeable. A bit of software 
> looking for potential celebrity stalkers would need to be able to deal with 
> these variations; 

this looks like what RDF, DAML and a host of small-scale RDF parsers and
spiders, already do: the negotiation between namespaces and resolving how
they might interconnect and alter each others implications. the
kendall/bijan articles on xml.com i posted two mails ago go into a lot of
this, and they're both over a year old. 

yes, RDF is a subset of prolog, and toolkits like redland (
http://www.redland.opensource.ac.uk , but there's a big new bugfix release
coming soon so i wouldnt play too much now, the python api is a long way
ahead of the perl one ) are just providing semwebish ways to negotiate its
search space, its problem space.        
i'm learning prolog now, and if you are into it, i think you'd really like
http://logicmoo.sf.net 
  
> perhaps some kind of relationship synonym directory 
> maintained by volunteers, or a central registry that encourages people to 
> find an existing relationship rather than searching for a new one...

here i think scope and i think decentralisation. i also think bots; this
stuff can be done with dynamic bot arbitration pretty successfully, and
for me the bots also provide a good hook to hang semweb applications from. 

> But anyway. What will actually pull together all of these assertions to come 
> to conclusions (and how will it deal with contradictory or untrustworthy 
> information)? I see something like Google being the only thing that can 
> actually make semantic inferences with much utility; for everyone else it'll 
> be limited to their corporate intranets or they will explicitly subscribe to 
> information services - "sign up to get hold of a huge knowledge base about 
> cats", rather than the more peer to peer model of publishing we currently 
> have.

so you've read http://www.ftrain.com/google_takes_all.html and, possibly,
not thought about it hard enough ;) the tech allows the community to start
making local inferences ad hoc. the tech also allows people at the top of
business trees to suck the kb out of the clue people beneath them. but at
that kind of distance, at that level of detail, it seems difficult to ask
the right kind of questions, without getting very distorted answers.    
it's something new.

> So I'm skeptical!

well, i'm wildly optimistic :) i'm also running out of steam a bit, and
have bot glue to cook up before dorkbot wednesday, so i'm going to have to
secede and stop countertrolling now ;P

zx
--
"Common sense won't tell you. We have to tell each other." -DNA