Semantic... what a word!

The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web, annotated in a way that computers can "understand," is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practical technology.

… The purpose of the semantic web is to enable computers to "understand" semantics the way humans do. Equipped with this "understanding," computers will theoretically be able solve problems that are out of reach today….

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was presented in 2000 (see image below), the rest of the post will focus on the difficulties with this approach.

Well, this remember me first application of computers; translate Russian texts. So English speaking word will understand first flight in space. If I remember well, this was in 1957 or software able to translate on demand we have only after 2001. And those translations have to appear in public after human corrections.

The same ideas appear here, Russian have software for server able to interpret “xml” pages according with user’s manifested preferences. It seems to me that we are still overwhelming language barriers forgotten that is hard to obtain lets say a walking robot.

Because the designers were shooting for flexibility and completeness, the end result are documents that are confusing, verbose and difficult to analyze.

Again, designers, people searcing for something new, do not want to respect standards ;-)

If it is to be done be a centralized entity, then there will need to be Google-like semantic web crawler that takes pages and transforms them into RDF. This comes back to the issue we just discussed - having an automatic algorithm that infers meaning from text the way humans do. Creating such an algorithm may not be possible at all (and again begs the question of the need for RDF if the algorithm exists).

:-) Google is the worst enemy….or Chinese programmers have something new…

For example, suppose there are representations of a book defined by Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Each has common fields like ISBN and Author, but there maybe subtle differences, i.e., one of them may define edition like this: 1st edition and the other like this: edition 1. This seemingly minor difference, one that people would not even think twice about, would wreak havoc in computers.

The only way to have interoperability is to define a common standard for how to describe a book. So having self-describing documents is not enough, because there still needs to be a literal syntactic agreement in order for computer systems to interoperate. The bottom line is that there needs to be a standard and an API....

The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web, annotated in a way that computers can "understand," is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practical technology. The technical, scientific and business difficulties are substantial, and to overcome them, there needs to be more community support, standards and pushing. This is not likely to happen unless there are more clear reasons for it.

Well, nice conclusion for a person that neglect networks administrator’s jobs.

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b2bweb

Sa vedem ce mai fac Romanii din Romania!

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9.11 from Ann Arbor

2001: World Trade Center and Pentagon attacked by terrorists
On this day in 2001, 19 militants associated with the terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four planes in the United States, crashing three into buildings (the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania) and killing some 3,000 people.

Ann Arbor is in Michigan and here at 8:43 some people recall from memory that day, worst than Pearl Harbor day in American recent history.

Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-Disaster Research

NSF Media Briefing

Engineers Week
Monday, February 23, 2004
National Science Foundation
Arlington, Virginia

Insight into Research at Ground Zero, Presented by the Researchers Who Were There
On Monday, February 23, the National Science Foundation hosted six of the nation's top rapid-response researchers to report on their experiences at Ground Zero.
Read about this event.

Scientists Use the "Dark Web" to Snag Extremists and Terrorists Online

Team from the University of Arizona identifies and tracks terrorists on the Web

The Dark Web project team catalogues and studies places online where terrorists operate.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.
... A recent report estimates that there are more than 5,000 Web sites created and maintained by known international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgencies, and many home-grown terrorist cells in Europe....

Techniques:
	Social network analysis
	The technologies used are statistical analysis, cluster analysis, social network analysis (SNA), visualization, and various other approaches. SNA has recently been recognized as a promising technology for studying criminal and terrorist networks. Specifically, we use the centrality and structural equivalence measures from SNA to measure the importance of each network member. Centralities such as degree, prestige, betweenness, and closeness can automatically identify the leaders, gatekeepers, and outliers from a network. To detect terrorist groups in a network we employ traditional hierarchical clustering algorithms. In addition, with a rich set of approaches and metrics from SNA, we extract interaction patterns between groups using blockmodeling approach, analyze and predict the stability of a terrorist group using group density and cohesion measures. Moreover, we examine its topological characteristics in terms of level of centralization and degree of hierarchy. These structural properties found can be of great help in revealing the vulnerability of a terrorist organization.

....

...The book, in the end, is an invitation to critical thinking of some of the major myths of American History. Woods does not attempt to denigrate his targets or examine the issues in minute detail, instead offering a second look at American history. Even though everyone may not agree with Woods’ on all of the issues, it is more important to him that people know that there is another side to many of the best-known stories of America, and draw their own conclusions, rather than take the official public school-taught propaganda at face value.
or
A Review of "33 Questions about American History You're Not Supposed to Ask"

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