12 results for question%20answering

The discussion of semantic search has gradually become popular. Just not long time ago, semantic search was thought to be barely a little bit more than a dream. At present, optimistic researchers have started to believe its possibility in the near future. Very recently at Read/WriteWeb, Dr. Riza C. Berkan, the CEO of Hakia (a company declared to perform "semantic search"), posted an article about semantic search that attracted much attention. Despite of agreeing with the post, here are more thoughts about semantic search.

Continue reading Semantic search has two legs

More and more people are starting to discuss the Semantic Web, but few truly understand how it is different from the traditional World Wide Web. Though the Semantic Web will be realized as a layer upon the current Web, some of their basic philosophies are going to be updated significantly. This post tries to list some truth about the Semantic Web that is critical but often overlooked.

Continue reading Some Truth about the Semantic Web

After the last post about "web of agents", I received a few questions about the "web of data." A few readers mistook my argument to be opposite of a web of data. Don't get me wrong, I have never been opposed to the presentation of a "web of data." I only emphasize that the web-of-data presentation is short of describing the human-web relationship in the Semantic Web. To encourage the engagement of more ordinary people to the grand vision of the Semantic Web, we need a more user-oriented presentation, i.e. a web of agents.

Continue reading Metadata or Hyperdata, Link or Thread, What is a Web of Data?

The Curse of Knowledge: the more you know, the more difficult it is for you to communicate knowledge. When we know something, we can hardly imagine not knowing it. The more we learn about something, the more it becomes even harder for us to think of not knowing it. It is generally difficult for experts (who know much) to explain their expertise to laymen (who know little) because experts have to try hard to imagine the scenario when they were not experts. This is the Curse of Knowledge.

Continue reading The Curse of Knowledge and the Semantic Web

True Knowledge is a natural language search engine and question answering site, but to leave it at that would not do the site justice. What makes it stand out from similar sounding services like Powerset and Freebase? True Knowledge tackles natural language search and question answering (much like Powerset and Hakia), and it also maintains a knowledge base of facts about the world (similar to DBpedia and Freebase). However, what makes True Knowledge stand out is that they've combined these features and encourage their userbase to contribute facts and add new knowledge.

Continue reading True Knowledge: The Natural Language Question Answering Wikipedia for Facts

Yihong Ding released the 10th and final installment to his series A View of Web Evolution. In the final installment of the series Yihong poses the question of how we will know when we've finally reached the next stage in Web evolution.

Continue reading Yihong Ding Wraps-Up "A View of Web Evolution" Series

While I am still waiting for an invitation from Twine (probably you too?) I have received one from Powerset - natural language search. Powerset obviously is a promising company (and is promising a lot), so I was excited when I was starting to play around with this new tool which still isn't available for the public.

Continue reading Natural Language Search - A New Breakthrough?

Over the weekend I opened the doors to Planet Semantic Focus, our Semantic Web buzz aggregator! In a nutshell, PSF makes it easy for you to keep tabs on what's going within the Semantic Web community. In its current version (beta) the system is tracking blog posts from various sources and bloggers.

Continue reading Planet Semantic Focus: Aggregating Semantic Web Buzz

11 months ago I posted a short entry that posed the question of whether the world needed a metadata extraction service. I stated that the service could quickly become the largest repository of metadata (in the form of named entites and facts) on the Web if it stored the resulting metadata from each request. Open Calais seems to me to be the "metadata extraction service" I had in mind; it's is a Web service that allows you to automatically annotate content and extract information like facts and named entities (people, places, and organizations, and much more) from unstructured text. If that weren't enough of a good thing, Open Calais returns the metadata in RDF.

Although the question of whether we need it still hasn't been answered, I believe this service could be a catalyst for change towards Semantic Web standards if it is integrated into (or used to create plugins for) the multitudes of open source blogs and other CMS software. Open Calais opens the door to the possibility of lowering the barrier enough for everyday users to publish semantic content.

To begin with, there is a very simple idea: Websites should themselves indicate their changes to the search engines. I've already touched upon the subject in the previous part of this series, right now search engines have a reversed approach which consists of crawling the Web constantly looking for the slightest modification. Don't you think it's silly? Think about the number of Web pages to visit, imagine the cost to get the lowest frequency between each visit. Consequently, it seems difficult to consider the development of new search engines today. Nevertheless, the advent of the Semantic Web should lead to their multiplication, in a vertical way, while search engines are getting specialized more and more in specific fields.

Continue reading The Object Oriented Web - Part 2 - Datahubs