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The Semantic Web is truly the all of those things -- but this is not that. My guess is that this will just end up as a sharpened version of the data section of

The Semantic Web is truly the all of those things -- but this is not that. My guess is that this will just end up as a sharpened version of the data section of Wikipedia results that we have now. Why? Because they are selling it without mentioning why they won't fail where every other attempt has. There are huge difficulties in this. Have they turned a corner on the research that changes something? I don't see it in what they've so hinted at so far.

azov 14y ago
Google is sitting on an enormous pile of semantic data that dwarfs anything that any AI project could possibly use 20 or even 10 years ago. Of course it does not guarantee that they won't fail as well, but it sure gives them an edge.
- irickt 14y ago
  Yes, like the HTML web this web of data grows by network effects. The "Semantic Web" was only ever a data model and exchange formats - a standard to guide independent efforts. Now, of course, a lot of that data will be protected by the internet giants for their competitive reasons, but the standards still provide the interoperation at the edges.
- bergie 14y ago
  It also appears that SEO is finally the thing that gets people to actually publish semantically-marked data, so they'll get some of this more easily in the near future. http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_us_into_semantic_web/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_u...
JPKab 14y ago
I think that there are two things in their favor here: First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it. Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications. I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
  There's little need. It's a direct application of concepts that are well treated academically in all the various datalog papers.
  - daoudc 14y ago
    Taking academic research to production ready code is far from trivial.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
      I think that generalization is false as often as it is true. But also, have you read any of the papers involved? Datalog is pretty simple. It's a restricted, forward chaining prolog. Once you know that, you can recreate most of it from that description alone.
- toby 14y ago
  Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed the book. I wanted to point out that Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor were also authors (and still work on the Knowledge Team at Google) and should get some credit.
  - JPKab 14y ago
    Haha! Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mean to leave them off. I met you guys in 2009 at a semantic tech conference, back before Metaweb was purchased. So glad to see your work being pushed to the most popular website in the world.
j_baker 14y ago
This is Google's search team we're talking about here. They might make the mistake of overestimating how much people will like something like this. They might make the mistake of underestimating how many resources something like this will take. However, they simply don't make mistakes of the kind you're talking about. I'd be willing to bet money that there's a bullet-proof theoretical model behind what they're doing. And they probably aren't ready to talk about it yet.
- Drbble 14y ago
  You are falling for the fallacy of infallibility. You assume they are successful because they have some magic secret, not just a lot of hard work.
  - j_baker 14y ago
    Except that I named two areas where they can make mistakes. And Google's success is indeed because of the hard work they've put into building such a smart team of search engineers.
- Drbble 14y ago
  You are falling for the fallacy of infallibility. You assume they are successful because they have some magic secret, not just a lot of hard work.
boyter 14y ago
I agree. This looks to me to just be Wikipedia presented next to the search term. Much the same as DuckDuckGo http://duckduckgo.com/?q=taj+mahal http://duckduckgo.com/?q=taj+mahal Congrats Gabriel, you got to them :) I thought that while flawed cpedia (from one of the cuil founders) was a much more interesting push on this idea then Googles one currently is.

azov 14y ago

Google is sitting on an enormous pile of semantic data that dwarfs anything that any AI project could possibly use 20 or even 10 years ago. Of course it does not guarantee that they won't fail as well, but it sure gives them an edge.

irickt 14y ago
Yes, like the HTML web this web of data grows by network effects. The "Semantic Web" was only ever a data model and exchange formats - a standard to guide independent efforts. Now, of course, a lot of that data will be protected by the internet giants for their competitive reasons, but the standards still provide the interoperation at the edges.
bergie 14y ago
It also appears that SEO is finally the thing that gets people to actually publish semantically-marked data, so they'll get some of this more easily in the near future. http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_us_into_semantic_web/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/google-s_rich_snippets_will_lead_u...

JPKab 14y ago

I think that there are two things in their favor here: First, they are Google, and therefore possess huge quantities of data and the ability, courtesy of their uber map reduce prowess and ultra-fast custom hardware, to make sense of it. Second, they bought Metaweb (makers of Freebase) and with it some of the best semantic expertise out there. Toby Segaran is a brilliant dude. His O'Reilly book "Programming the Semantic Web" explains in 20 pages what most books take 150 pages to do: the concept of a URI based graph database and how it enables data to be merged from multiple sources and reasoned over with applications. I only hope Google open-sources some of their research here for the rest of us.

jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
There's little need. It's a direct application of concepts that are well treated academically in all the various datalog papers.
- daoudc 14y ago
  Taking academic research to production ready code is far from trivial.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
    I think that generalization is false as often as it is true. But also, have you read any of the papers involved? Datalog is pretty simple. It's a restricted, forward chaining prolog. Once you know that, you can recreate most of it from that description alone.
toby 14y ago
Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed the book. I wanted to point out that Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor were also authors (and still work on the Knowledge Team at Google) and should get some credit.
- JPKab 14y ago
  Haha! Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't mean to leave them off. I met you guys in 2009 at a semantic tech conference, back before Metaweb was purchased. So glad to see your work being pushed to the most popular website in the world.

j_baker 14y ago

This is Google's search team we're talking about here. They might make the mistake of overestimating how much people will like something like this. They might make the mistake of underestimating how many resources something like this will take. However, they simply don't make mistakes of the kind you're talking about. I'd be willing to bet money that there's a bullet-proof theoretical model behind what they're doing. And they probably aren't ready to talk about it yet.

Drbble 14y ago
You are falling for the fallacy of infallibility. You assume they are successful because they have some magic secret, not just a lot of hard work.
- j_baker 14y ago
  Except that I named two areas where they can make mistakes. And Google's success is indeed because of the hard work they've put into building such a smart team of search engineers.
Drbble 14y ago
You are falling for the fallacy of infallibility. You assume they are successful because they have some magic secret, not just a lot of hard work.

boyter 14y ago

I agree. This looks to me to just be Wikipedia presented next to the search term. Much the same as DuckDuckGo http://duckduckgo.com/?q=taj+mahal http://duckduckgo.com/?q=taj+mahal Congrats Gabriel, you got to them :) I thought that while flawed cpedia (from one of the cuil founders) was a much more interesting push on this idea then Googles one currently is.