This past Friday (8/24/07) Professor Raskin of Purdue University and Hakia gave a talk at the New York Semantic Web Meetup What follows is a summary of Raskin's points and my own thoughts on the topic.
Summary Of Key Points
- Conceptually, the Semantic Web (SW) is a good and noble vision.
- The present proposal for the SW by Tim Berners-Lee (et. al.) will fail.
- Formalisms like OWL don't capture meaning. Tagging is not representation of meaning (shallow semantics = no semantics).
- The average web author (or even above average) is not skilled enough to tag properly. Semantics requires well-trained ontologists.
- Manually tagging can be used to deceive search engines.
- Formalisms, in and of themselves, are useless. The meaning of the formalism is what counts.
- Ontology (like steal-making) is something that requires highly skilled practitioners. Ontology is not for the masses.
- Most computer scientists know next to nothing about language or semantics.
- Statistical and syntactic techniques are useless if one is after meaning.
- Native speakers are experts in using their language but are highly ignorant about their language (i.e., how language works).
- Meaning is language independent, so even though ontologies use symbols that look like words, they are really tokens for language-independent concepts.
- Raskin's Ontologic formalism is called Text Meaning Representation (TMR).
- TMR uses a frame like construct where the slots store case roles, constraints and other information like style modality, references, etc. (See http://ontologicalsemantics.com/tmr-new.pdf).
- The Semantic Web does not need OWL or any other tagged based system because web authors will not need to tag once a full Ontological Model (and other related tools, like lexicons, semantic parsers, etc.) are available.
- Ontological Search Engine will be able to index pages by meaning without the help of web authors.
- This is what Hakia is working on.
My Impressions of the Presentation
Professor Raskin is a very good presenter with a unique and humorous style (think of a cross between Jackie Mason, David Letterman and Albert Einstein). His points resonated well with my own impressions of the present architecture and direction of the Semantic Web. However, I thought that his presentation was too unbalanced. There were far too many slides critical of the SW and Tim Berners-Lee, in particular and far too little on Ontological Semantics.
My Thoughts on Raskin's Points
- I could not agree more with Raskin on the inadequacy of the present architecture of the SW.
- I also believe it is primarily the job of automated software tools to extract semantic information. However, I think web authors could help these tools be more efficient. My earlier post speaks to this point somewhat but after hearing Raskin's presentation, I plan to refine these thoughts in a future post.
- Raskin's point on the difficulty of "the masses" creating ontologies does not bode well for my vision of a Wisdi. However I am not the least bit discouraged by his bias toward expertly trained ontologists.
- Pre-Linux, experts in operating systems would have claimed that a commercial grade operating system could never be constructed by a loose band of programmer-enthusiasts.
- Pre-Wikipedia, intellectuals would have thumbed their nose at the idea of a competitive encyclopedia being authored by "the masses".
- The success of these projects stem from three major ingredients:
- The involvement of some expert individuals
- The involvement of many many enthusiastic but not necessarily expert participants.
- Unending rounds of testing and refinement (ala Agile Methods and Extreme Programming).
- So I believe that a Wisdi model can ultimately kill an elitist approach because the elitist-expert approach can get too expensive. Information, knowledge and meaning do not remain static so ontologies must change and grow to remain relevant. I think an open collaborative approach is a good model for this endeavor. If you agree, I'd love to hear from you (flames equally welcome!).
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