Semantic Web Company

Jamie Taylor, Metaweb

Andreas Blumauer from Semantic Web Company (SWC) talked with Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies Inc. about Freebase & Linked Data and Google´s announcement to use RDFa.

SWC: At ISWC 2008 Freebase became “officially” part of the LOD Cloud. What exactly has changed since that time?

Jamie: Since Freebase is a community writable semantic database, the addition of the RDF interface allows anyone to publish data into the LOD cloud. LOD Applications can access any Freebase Topic through the RDF interface by constructing a URI from the Freebase identifier.  But perhaps more importantly, because entities in Freebase can be annotated with multiple identifiers, Freebase Topics can be retrieved by constructed URIs using the identifiers used by other systems and data sets.
For instance, the movie Blade Runner can be referred to as http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.blade_runner, but it can also be referenced as http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/authority.netflix.movie.70053131 using the Netflix identifier, http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/authority.imdb.title.tt0083658 using the IMDB identifier, or as http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/wikipedia.en.Dangerous_Days using a Wikipedia wikiword (which in this case is a Wikipedia redirect to the wikiword Blade_Runner).
Freebase also provides a user maintained mapping of how these identifiers can be used to address resources in other LOD systems. The sameas.freebase.com schema can tell an LOD user that the Freebase Blade Runner Topic can also be found in DBpedia using Wikipedia identifiers or how musical artists can be found at the BBC using Musicbrainz identifiers.  In fact, the Freebase RDF interface uses the sameas.freebase.com schema to create the owl:sameAs links in the RDF output allowing the user community to expand the interconnections between Freebase and the LOD Cloud.
Linked Data providers are also using the strong identifiers in Freebase to identify entities such as companies and locations in their own data sets.  When they find an entity that is not represented in Freebase, they simply add the entity to Freebase and use the newly minted Freebase identifier.  This permits anyone using their data to understand how their entities relates to any of the more than 5 million things interconnected within Freebase.

The RDF interface can also be used to reference the Freebase type system, giving LOD data set providers vocabularies across a wide range of subject areas.  And because anyone can expand Freebase’s data model, data providers can use our schema development tools to build and extend these vocabularies to suite their needs.
Freebase was not designed for ephemeral or fast changing data, like weather conditions or stock ticks.  But this type of information is well suited for publication as Linked Data.  Freebase entities representing a location or company can be annotated with references to LOD services that provide these types of volatile data.  Similarly, Linked Data provides a great way to disseminate very fined grained information that might be associated with a scientific study or financial report.  Linked Data provides a seemless transition from Freebase, where a user (or application) can run a query with constraints that run across a wide range of types to find entities of interest along with the LOD services that provide access to temporal or high resolution data not available in Freebase.
We recently demonstrated MQL Extensions which allows the Metaweb Query Language to use data from other systems as a part of the query constraint and result set.  While MQL Extensions are user extensible and work with a wide array of systems,  this capability makes the connection between Freebase and the LOD Cloud even more transparent.
For example, because US companies that are registered with the SEC are annotated CIK code in Freebase and the sameas.freebase.com schema indicates that the CIK annotation can be used to create a URI that is dereferencable at rdfabout.com, it is possible to write a MQL query that asks who is on the board of financial services companies that trade on NASDAQ and are  headquartered in California (and using another MQL Extension, you can ask for their stock price as well!)

SWC: Many organisations are very interested in Linking Open Data now but they are still not sure if they can benefit from publishing data on the web – what´s your experience so far?

Jamie: Linked Open Data provides a simple, standard way for organizations to distribute structured data.  For most organizations, providing access to data is another important outlet to announce the availability of higher value services.  For organizations involved in building or selling physical goods, the bits representing what they provide are not the goods themselves, but a way of attracting potential customers.  Making catalogs and specification sheets available in electronic form, so other applications can connect buyers to their physical goods is simply an effective marketing system.  Even for firms involved in electronic services, providing access to open structured data is generally a lead-in to value added services.  For instance, if I ran a service collecting hard-to-find information about manufacturing relationships between medium sized businesses, I would publish open company profiles covering things like market size, industry, location for the medium-sized businesses I tracked, so potential users the premium data would know I had the coverage they were looking for.

SWC: Just recently Google has announced to use RDFa to enhance their search results. What do you think?

Jamie: We are excited about Google’s announcement. Yahoo’s use of RDFa for Search Monkey and Google’s announcement gives RDFa users tangible benefits. The Search Monkey team was very quick to realize that because users can create data models in Freebase, and because the elements of those models all have strong RDF identifiers, Freebase provides a large and user extensible vocabulary for RDF/RDFa (see the list of vocabularies). When a user wants to create a Search Monkey application that works with their film review site, they need not invent a new vocabulary (that will probably be used only once),  they can use the Freebase Film Domain vocabulary which supports over 63,000 instances in Freebase alone.
Similarly, with over 5 Million well described Topics in Freebase and over 14,000,000 Named Objects (Topics, images, musical tracks and documents) when a user wants to unambiguously identify a subject or object in RDF/RDFa, Freebase has an extremely large collection of identifiers to draw from.  These cover people, places, companies, movies, music, books and wide variety of other subjects.  If Freebase doesn’t have the entity the user is looking for, they can of course add it themselves and make use of the identifier immediately. I think this is why Google used some Freebase identifiers in their examples. We hope that with Yahoo and Google’s support for RDFa the web will become a strongly annotated source of data which can support a wide range of user applications.

SWC: Thank you, Jamie!

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While some people work heavily on the extension of the semantic web infrastructure, like Talis Connected Commons or OpenLink´s Amazon EC2 Instantiation others have started to bring the semantic web closer to the developers and therefore to a much broader audience: They offer search facilities or Linked Data Navigators like OpenLink´s Entity Finder or DERI´s VisiNav.

Those kind of applications should not be confused with “semantic web” end-user-applications like Google´s Wonderwheel or INTSPEI´s Cloudlet: To add some semantics to existing user-interfaces can be helpful and obviously users are ready for such experiments, but of course this is NOT the innovation which the semantic web will bring but it is a very important step to be taken in parallel with the linked data initiative.

Let´s take a look at Cloudlet: This tool is an easy-to-use free Firefox extension that adds context-sensitive tag clouds to the most popular search engines and helps people more efficiently navigate through their search results. The previous version of Search Cloudlet worked with Google and Yahoo; the new version also works with Twitter. It adds Tag Clouds, Author Clouds, Recipient Clouds and Hashtag Clouds to Twitter search, Twitter user profiles and home pages. See some reviews on this popular tool.

Cloudlet is a child of the Web. INTSPEI has learned all lessons from Web 2.0 especially how to promote ideas using the blogosphere and how to identify market trends as early as possible, and it generates some added value for the users which is obvious. Sure, it doesn´t make use of linked data yet, but as a typical representative of the fast growing “semantic search evolution” it reminds me on Chris Welty´s famous insight: “In the Semantic Web, it is not the Semantic which is new, it is the Web which is new.”

Web 1.0 was the WWW without tons of network effects. Web 2.0 changed that a lot.

Linked Data is not the Semantic Web, it´s the basement for it. From a software developer´s and an IT archictect´s perspective it might seem as those two concepts were the same. But this community represents a very small percentage of all web-users.

So where is the User´s Web in the Linked Data architecture? If you´re looking at TimBL´s Linked Data principles one can clearly see that this is a “Web” for developers.

But things evolve. And some Web companies will jump on the bandwagon and will, for instance, improve their tagclouds, their semantic search, their recommender systems (Twine?) or their similarity search a lot by making use of linked data.

Like semantic search becomes mainstream (or call it “semantic search 2.0″) right now, then (in about three years, I guess) linked data will become part of a lot of mainstream applications. Linked data will generate tons of new network effects, maybe even new business models, it won´t be avant-garde anymore. It will be part of the Semantic Web.

Maybe you have noticed it already; today in the morning something new appeared at Google’s search engine interface: A bunch of corresponding search-suggestions based on your search query. Google spoke about this enhancement:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

I tried it. So, if you type in “time travel” you also get search proposals like “theory of relativity time travel” or “wormhole time travel”. Google annouced, that the service is available in various languages. The direct test with German is a little disillusioning: Searching for “zeit reise” (which is the same concept as above, in german) leads to alternative searches like “reisen 50er jahren” (travel 50ies) and “reisen im mittelalter” (travel in the medieval).

Even if this semantic-like extension of the basis search function still needs some tuning, the point is getting clearer: Also Google is doing developments to get more meaningful results into their search algorithms. And parts of the semantic methodology are finding their way into mainstream services like search engines – as we have seen with Wolfram Alpha some days ago. So keep your eyes open – maybe next morning you’ll find another piece of the semantic puzzle embedded into one of your favorite web-apps.

Just recently Google launched another interesting service called “In Quotes”. It delivers quotes from stories linked to from Google News and users can compare opinions of e.g. politicians in a very comfortable way.

If  a closer look is taken at the system, one can see that any person whose quotes are listed has got a URI: Barack Obama has got the uniform “qsid” tPjE5CDNzMicmM.

It seems like “qsid” stands for “Quad Store ID” which would perfectly support such a URI based system.

Does Google slowly approximate to the Semantic Web?

If Nova Spivack and Doug Lenat are positive with what they have seen from Wolfram Alpha, I am also close of being convinced that the internet community won´t be dissapointed by Alpha´s first release. Just remember, which hype was caused by Cuil´s PR-strategy of spreading news about their first release throughout the blogosphere, and scarcely anybody would talk about this engine anymore.

After all what I have read about Wolfram Alpha, one thing obviously can be stated: Wolfram Alpha will be a perfect addition to traditional search engines like Google, but will never replace it. For example: In the first paragraph of this blog I have used Google Services like “Google Blog Search” or “Google Trends” to prove some of my statements (in a broader sense: to give answers to those, who want to know, why this is my opinion). Such services Alpha won´t deliver, but it will do other things much better than Google. Doug Lenat:

At one extreme is, say, Google, which responds to almost anything like a faithful puppy bringing in the morning newspaper without understanding much of anything it’s fetching (recognizing words in what it returns, often leading to amusing or hair-raising inappropriate “ads” being displayed, and leading to tons of false positives and false negatives).  At the other extreme is, say, Cyc, which only can answer a small fraction of user queries, but can answer ones that require common sense (not just common sense queries like “Do surgeons often operate on themselves?”, but ones where the logical application of such knowledge is required to correctly disambiguate and parse the user’s query containing pronouns, elisions, ambiguous words, ellipsis, and so on) and where every piece of the query and every piece of the answer is as deeply understood as, say, arithmetic.  Wolfram Alpha is somewhere around the geometric mean of those two extremes.

Search engines or question answering machines (QA) which understand the meaning of the query and/or of the result are not completely new and some of them are really useful like good old START.

But the point is: In many cases of information demand people can´t express the right question.

Why didn´t START become the default browser if it can even answer questions? I think the USP of Alpha will be, that it can give the right answer to more questions than any other QA machine before. But still, the real “search engine revolution” won´t happen, until engines will be able to help users to formulate the proper questions and will help to interprate the right results. Therefore we need to rethink some search paradigms from scratch.

Sure, that´s not the end of the flagpole – but “a little semantics goes a long way” (Jim Hendler): With two Firefox add-ons, you can pimp your Google and you will get (1) a better overview over the search results, (2) kind of a moderated search and (3) information from Wikipedia along with the results.

Install Cloudlet and Googlepedia (Don´t forget to donate!) and you will see something like this:

Sure, both “mashups” are not based on RDF, and the “TagCloud” is not as accurate as we wished, but let us be patient again. At least this picture makes end-users yearning for a bit more semantics (which goes a long way…) on top of the usual lists of search results.

Just stumbled upon this observation in a blog post by Daniel Tunkelang where he compares Yahoo’s and Google’s latest key word tools, and chuckled. The occasion was Yahoo’s release of a new BOSS features called Key Terms, and Google’s announcement of the release of a new tool that tells you which keyterms you’re missing (i.e. should potentially buy):

I imagine that the technology behind both tools isn’t all that different–or at least doesn’t have to be. But, while Yahoo makes friends in the technology community (especially among researchers), Google makes friends in the advertising community–and makes itself oodles of money.

Nice analogy, Daniel!

Just stumbled upon SemantiFind via T3N, and then upon the review on ReadWriteWeb from last week Thursday.

What’s it about? Semantifind is an IE and FF browser plug-in that extends Google’s search functionalities, most notably through a typeahead functionality that allows you to refine your search results before hitting ‘enter’. ReadWriteWeb wasn’t too impressed though:

Unfortunately, SemantiFind is one of those tools that’s good in theory, but not so good in practice. When performing some test searches, results were not as precise as they should have been. For example, in the above-mentioned search for “Georgia,” a search for the U.S. state returned Google results for the country as well.

Ambiguities due to homonyms such as Georgia vs Georgia, or Java vs Java are among the faves of people who are trying to pitch a semantic tool to you – but I really wonder whether the effects of homonyms aren’t highly overrated? How often do people really search for these, and in particular search for these without context, i.e. further search terms such as in ‘Georgia Tech’, ‘Georgia war’, ‘Java Coffee’ or ‘Java bugs’?

I must say I was quite impressed by the choice of search terms offered, and if you (like me) are easy prey for the serendipity effect, then SemantiFind can please and distract you endlessly. Here is a preview of what appears if you enter ’serendipity’ – please note the preview of possible descriptions and definitions which you get on the Google homepage with the plugin (click > big):

Once you pick a term it turns into a kind of button (just slightly annoying: you cannot edit a term after it’s turned into a button, but would have to delete the whole thing and type again if you want to change your search query):

And then, what happens? On the search results page, you see results filtered by SemantiFind’s user-generated, user-approved labels on top of the other search results – which irritated me at first as it comes across as a search engine within the search engine. Admittedly: I’d rather sift through 13 results than through 10,900,00 search results (even though I never make it to the end of Google’s search list anyway; does anybody?) – but does the article about trees doing their best work with thermostats at 70° really deserve the second rank in SemantiFind’s list of recommended search results?

So while I agree with RWW that this “just goes to show why search engines that rely on people to filter the results might not work. Human error shouldn’t be a factor in web searches”, I am still quite fond of the suggestions and definition previews. I would probably use SemantiFind regularly if they allowed me to configure the plugin in such a way that I’d get the suggestions on the input page, but not the recommended results on the results page.

What’s the source of these results anway? SemantiFind’s recommended results seem to rely entirely on input generated by users – to add input, you need to install their toolbar and start adding labels to websites; if a website has been labeled before, you can confirm or reject existing labels. What’s nice: a label recommender (only presumably the same one that’s used for search queries) reduces ambiguity. What’s curious: You can also browse the pages you have already labeled in what they call your “catalogue” – which makes the service even more reminiscent of a bookmarking service, and which makes me wonder whether one shouldn’t possibly link this with a del.icio.us/Mr.Wong/Bibsonomy/Faviki account (Faviki would probably be the best, considering their tag recommendations are based on DBpedia, and considering that Faviki just added 1 million new tags and now holds more than 5 million tags across all languages)

Questions that remain: I’d really like to know how they maintain their list of suggested labels – ambiguity, typos, plurals forms, i.e. the usual folksonomy issues must be a big challenge. Also, I’d like to know where they get their definitions in the preview from – from Google? Or are these user-generated as well? There must, after all, be some use for the “request a new definition” form?

Too bad they don’t have a blog to which one could send a track back, and there is nothing much on their company page either.

After publishing the first Cuil post this morning and adding it to my list of semantic search engines, I realized that I hadn’t checked its foreign language abilities. German is the only language I can assess as a native, so I searched for a few popular German terms like Fernsehprogramm (TV guide), Thomas Godoj (German winner of Pop idol) and Bauchtanz (belly dance). Turns out foreign languages might (yet) be its Achilles heel…

First off: Cuil (not quite understandably!) does not know Thomas Godoj, it doesn’t even recommend it as a popular search. Not even his official homepage is listed. Cuil promises to respect privacy – which might mean that it doesn’t even track IPs because the single quality search result it offers is the Thomas Godoj entry in the ENGLISH wikipedia. The selected pictures show pop singer James Blunt and the World Cup Trophy (from 2006 – i.e. before Thomas’ reign) and most search results actually link to video pages where Cuil probably found the most relevant tags as the links read:
video.worldcupblog.org/tags/Godoj/
www.mefeedia.com/tags/godoj/
www.bitdig.com/search/torrent-thomas+godoj/

On to Fernsehprogramm… (more…)

The blogosphere is abuzz with Cuil – according to its inventors Cuil is “an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.” If it’s got knowledge in it, it must have something to do with semantics – and like most of its competitors in the semantic arena, Cuil doesn’t lift the lid to show us what exactly is cooking in their pot. But it must have something to do with concepts and relationships – and their privacy promise also has some appeal in the era of data retention. Here is how they put it:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

And of course there is the promise of the biggest index on the web ever, three times as big as Google’s, ten times as big as Microsoft’s… but size isn’t everything, I say, so let’s rather have a look at the (semantic) user experience.

Cuil did receive some praise for it’s (web 2.0.ish) appearance – meaning that the search field has, well, rounded edges and the search button comes with a shine (and the background is pitch black, so if Cuil manages to become as popular as Google, this might even reduce global warming:-). But the presentation of the search results is indeed pleasing to the semantic eye: The so-called “drilldown” shows related categories and instances for these categories and roll-over definitions for these terms. The search field recommends popular search terms, the results are organized in paragraphs, alternative searches are suggested in tabs – “Jamie Oliver” yields several alternative tabs, “RDF”, by comparison, doesn’t yield any.

On top of that, Cuil is REALLY fast – or at least today it is. Yesterday on Twitter, people were complaining about the page not loading – probably no surprise after the media frenzy that ensued after its launch. Lest I forget: Cuil was launched by former Google employees – and who would be in a better position to attack and cull (cheap pun) Google if not former Googlistas? Hence the frenzy.

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