Connectivity is Not Semantics!

Reading the article on Times Online, March 12, 2008, it starts with the definition “ The semantic web is the term used by the computer and internet industry to describe the next phase of the web’s development, and essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data – not just a web page – so that it can “communicate” with other information.

Sounds good, but I find it grossly incomplete.

The term “semantic” refers to a cognitive process of understanding. It is a structure starting from data to reach its conceptual representations, then to retrieve related attributes from this representation to lead to a decision. Semantic is not just having connections to various forms of data and establishing lateral communication among them.

The article continues “Mr. Berners-Lee said.. Imagine if two completely separate things – your bank statements and your calendar – spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.” What Mr. Berners-Lee is saying can be interpreted in two ways, one of which is the simplistic view:

There is nothing semantic in this example. Data level communication between various forms of documents can be accomplished by the existing tags, or XML structures. You can go to Amazon.com and see connections between your purchase of a CD to a related book, which would not be much different than the example above.

When the term semantic is used, the heart of the problem is not the connectivity, it is the structure. The same example above should be considered in the following manner.

The important part is the concept map and lexicon by which a computer algorithm will make decisions for compliance. It is the process of diving into the concept space, and floating back to the surface with the correct sense of the data in hand. Only then your Web connectivity will become a Semantic Web connectivity. Mr. Berners-Lee’s example must be interpreted this way.

Another recent article by techcrunch touches the same topic. While this article acknowledges the semantic process better, it does not question the feasibility of having user communities complying with the difficult rules of semantic structures.

At hakia, we have built concept maps and English lexicon (over 100,000 word senses) with a dedicated team of well-trained linguists and ontologists over 3 years (and still continuing.) You can read about the science of Ontological Semantics and what it takes to do the job. It simply amuses us to find out about optimistic strategies that rely on the end-user to deploy semantic rules or to follow semantic standards. The semantic Web will not emerge out of the end-user or programmer communities, it has to be done by professionals, and delivered to them.

With the increasing emphasis on semantic search in the market, we are entering the phase of short-changed interpretations and incomplete definitions. Our insistence on correcting these views may seem unnecessary to some people. However, the past is full of examples of abusing the terms like natural language processing and artificial intelligence. We don’t want “semantic search” to become another victim of misrepresentations.

        

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.