Comments on: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

By: FluidDB: The next web paradigm? | Provoking: The blog of Filip Dousek

FluidDB: The next web paradigm? | Provoking: The blog of Filip Dousek — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:18:54 +0000

[...] a weekend reading everything I could find on the net ((@terrycojones, his blog, notable articles by Gerry Campbell, Paul Erb and the original firestater) and exchange a few long emails with Terry. Interest [...]

By: Lucky Robot - Semantics, Search & Big Honking Databases « Collecta.com Blog

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:30:43 +0000

[...] Lucky Robot – Semantics, Search & Big Honking Databases December 5, 2008 http://luckyrobot.com/2008/12/05/semantics-search-and-big-honking-databases/ [...]

By: Maxim

Maxim — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:26:14 +0000

I read your post and was amazed how our work close to what you describe here as semantic technology. We have developed a technology for semantic search and text analysis which leverage Wikipedia knowledge to derive concept meaning and relationships. To recent moment Wikipedia has grown into a massive up-to-date database of such relationships. We would like to show our technology to you as it implements nearly everything that you discribed in your post: disambiguation, semantic tagging, semantic similarity to find related content/concepts and more. Could you please email me at maxim@grinev.net and I will reply with more details. Thank you.

By: Maxim

Maxim — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:26:14 +0000

By: Kingsley Idehen

Kingsley Idehen — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:37:11 +0000

How about the burgeoning cloud of RDF based Linked Data?

Links:
1. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/images/dbpedia-l...
2. http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/Commu...
3. http://dbpedia.org/resource/Linked_Data - cross linked with Freebase and many other structured data spaces

By: Rob Mapstead

Rob Mapstead — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:01:54 +0000

With the 2010 Census on the horizon, I'm thinking about applying for a job with the Census just to see if I can help make sense of it all. Wouldn't it be great if the Census data actually provided us with data that all Americans could actually benefit from? Your discussion of tagging data is extremely important in this regard.

As it relates to tagging words, isn't this just XML? And don't we also need to tag whole phrases and not just words?

By: hymanroth

hymanroth — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:24:01 +0000

Gerry, I would say the goal is to *infer* context rather than codify it.

For example, in a document that it tagged as about MSFT, references to Gates are statistically more likely to refer to the person rather than the object. So, instead of tagging (codifying) each individual reference to Gates in the document, context can be inferred from one single tag, and hence the ambiguity resolved.

By: gerry campbell

gerry campbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:08:55 +0000

and can't we use co-occurrence, etc to establish that relatedness…

By: gerry campbell

gerry campbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:07:49 +0000

Does the nature of the task (and this discussion) change if we talk about it as codifying *relationships*? That's really where I am going.

I am not sure it makes any difference at all WHAT the thing is, it's more about the interrelatedness of one word to other words. In that case, the ambiguity is represented in a set of linkages that are more or less exclusive.

For example – the linkages to gates the thing vs gates the person would be different. Even in the case of that double entendre, the two sets could be statistically separable.

By: hymanroth

hymanroth — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:53:02 +0000

Gerry's right about 'semantics' being an overly used expression.

Terry's argument regarding the objective definition of meaning refers to the term's traditional philosophical usage, whereas Gerry and direwolf are talking about contextual ambiguity.

I believe pursuing semantics (philosophical) in computing is a futile endeavor until machines are able to feel the wind on the their faces.

Resolving contextual ambiguity, however, is a much more attainable and in many ways more useful goal. How many times have you Googled something only to be returned hundreds pages with the 'other' use of your key word?

Whether progress is made via changes in representation, better algorithms or even some sort of stochastic analysis is largely irrelevant (to me).

The key point is that whoever makes progress in this space will, as the VCs like to say, take away a lot of pain.