Miscellaneous |The Semantic Puzzle

No business is more complex than communications…

February 6, 2009 by Marion Fuglewicz-Bren, Category: Miscellaneous, Semantics & Philosophy

: Image via Wikipedia

As journalist and communications-professional I came acoss an article that I – although in German – have to recommend from the depth of my heart to everybody who is somehow concerned with communication. It´s an article on propaganda in the prestigious brandeins-magazine. Here´s a german commentary on it.

Communications and public relations are at least as complex as the Semantic Web is and it´s not accidental that both of them deal with language. Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed comprehension by talking about truth tables and anybody who deals with communication should act more explicit in terms of getting more understanding.

Reasoning Problems?

November 1, 2008 by Pascal Hitzler, Category: Conferences & Events, Miscellaneous, Ontology Engineering

I’m not going to explicitly comment on the panel discussion at ISWC08, entitled An OWL 2 Far? Let’s simply say it was controversial. I don’t mind controversial panels. In fact, I think that few things are more boring than a panel where all panelists more or less agree. But at the same time, at the ISWC08 panel, I think, an important message got lost, namely that we really need reasoning for the Semantic Web, and that we need diversity in reasoning. (Admittedly, some people said so, but I think the message didn’t really get through.)

So, instead, let me give you some web search problems. They all came up in my real life, so they are not artificially created. It seems to me that the Semantic Web should make answering them easier, but with the existing web resources, they are really difficult.

Find all papers having received best paper awards at ISWC conferences. I did that today, and it took me more than 30 minutes. And I’m not sure if I got all of them – indeed I would have missed one of them if I hadn’t known beforehand about that specific paper having received the award. Isn’t this a typical Semantic Web problem? (The results of my search are further below.)
There’s an owl-like bird in southern German woods, and in colloquial german it’s called Käuzchen. Try to find out the english name for this bird. I actually failed, though I think I got close to the answer when I merged web search with an external knowledge base (in form of a biologist I happen to know). And actually, simply going to Wikipedia and clicking on the English link is not enough, since I’m not looking for the Strix genus of owls, but rather for a particular bird …
Who is this researcher with the russian looking name who worked on resolution-based methods for the description logic EL? This also looks like a typical Semantic Search problem, which shouldn’t be too difficult if you have the corresponding knowledge (and background knowledge) available. I admit I failed on this one using traditional methods (unless you consider it a traditional method to ask Franz Baader by email about it.)
Are lobsters spiders? I.e. are lobsters classified as spiders by biologists? This one is actually tougher than you would think using traditional methods. Should be easy using Semantic Web knowledge bases and some simple reasoning, shouldn’t it?

For all these tasks (and many others), it seems to be apparent that Semantic Web Reasoning – and the availability of corresponding knowledge bases – would make the finding of answers much easier. The current reality of the Semantic Web is still quite a bit away from this. But we’re working on it.

Finally, as promised, the results of my inquiry about the ISWC best paper awards:

2004: Y. Guo, Z. Pan, and J. Heflin, An Evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems for Large OWL Datasets. This one compares different semantic web reasoners.
2005: The award was split that year. One half was awarded to P. Mika, Ontologies Are Us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics. The other half was awarded to B. Motik, On the Properties of Metamodeling in OWL. Edit: Apologies to Peter Mika. I accidently forgot his paper and mentioned instead a paper which won the best paper award at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers 2005, which is also abbreviated ISWC. It’s now been corrected. We definitely need Semantic Search!
2006: H. Chen, Y. Wang, H. Wang, Y. Mao, J. Tang, C. Zhou, A. Yin, Z. Wu, Towards a Semantic Web of Relational Databases: a Practical Semantic Toolkit and an In-Use Case from Traditional Chinese Medicine.
2007: D. Zeginis, Y. Tzitzikas and V. Christophides, On the Foundations of Computing Deltas Between RDF Models. This one is about a diff for RDF, and it involves RDF inferencing.
2008: M. Horridge, B. Parsia and U. Sattler, Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL.

So why did I dig these awards out? Because I noticed that among these 6 papers there are 3 which are explicitly concerned with OWL. And the 2007 paper involves RDF inferencing. Talk about the importance of reasoning for the Semantic Web …

Author: Pascal Hitzler, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

EU Parliament backs the rights of internet users

October 10, 2008 by Tassilo Pellegrini, Category: Companies & Institutions, Miscellaneous, Politics, Privacy & Information Ethics

For the past several months the EU Commission and the EU Parliament were struggling over the so called “Telecom Package“, a legislative initiative promoted by the Commission under heavy advocacy of France. In a nutshell the Telecom Package contains a very problematic passage, which is meant to strengthen the rights of ISPs in being able to cut off the internet access of individual users, if any violations of existing or future copyright law were detected. In other words: ISPs would be able to control who gets access to the internet, violating the universal service doctrine, which is a basic cornerstone of democracy.

In their first reading on September 24, 2008 the European Prarliament voted against the the “Telecom Package” advocating the so called “Bono Amendment” – which refers to the French Socialist MEP Guy Bono – which basically states that that courts need to be involved in any disconnection procedure. In the original passage, quoted in a recent EU Observer article, it says:

No restriction may be imposed on the rights and freedoms of end users … without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities.”

This decision has some relevant implications for any future developments of the internet. While the telcos and the media companies are struggling hard to adapt to the social logic the internet, searching for new business models and lobbying for regulation in their favour, it is obvious that the existing abundance and innovativeness of the internet is hardly compatible with their notion of making money on the web – basically by restricting access and promoting artificial scarcity.

It also is relevant to developments like Linking Open Data, as in an increasingly interconnected and mashupped world it is getting harder and harder to comply with strict and rigid copy- & usage rights policies – even if they are published under any sort of commons license. In this respect it is important to mention that research on judicial problems arising from the automated processing of content released under differing commons licenses is still missing (as far as I know – does anybody have a hint for me?). But with the current decision of the European Parliament we can observe a very promising shift in the notion that the internet is made up of much more than its commercial exploitability. And that any attempt to stiffle this notion by imposing unbalanced regulatory restrictions on the rights of the users is a major threat not just to the internet as it exists but to democracy itself.

In this respect enjoy a great talk of Lawrence Lessig on this topic.

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