Semantic Web Company

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.

Applications based on semantic technologies offer new ways to discover, browse and explore information – this is an established fact in the SemWeb community. But how can we (as semantic web “insiders”) communicate these potential benefits to a typical end-user who has never heard about “faceted search” before – which doesn’t mean that he or she wouldn’t love intelligent user interfaces if they were in place?

One answer lies in using mockups, which are, on the one hand, an indispensable instrument for prototyping user interfaces, but also valuable when it comes to explaining the workings of an application to an end-user, an audience of interested researchers or a client.

And when it comes to explaining a search engine or search widget, mockups are even more important, as we all and in particular end-users are often unable to think of search interfaces other than in terms of Google.

We have become so googlified that hardly anyone can think of different ways of searching for information than Google has offered for many years now: Put a couple of words in a text box, click a button and scroll through a list of titles and summaries. Repeat until you’re done, or try a new search and repeat. Wow!

Although even Google has started recently to implement a little bit of semantics by offering an auto-complete functionality on google.com (on some local versions like Google Austria this feature is still not available), even the most basic concepts for an intelligent search interface are still not part of common sense thinking.

Admittedly, there are people who get irritated instantly by complex user interfaces like David Huynh´s Freebase Parallax. “This is only for experts!” is their response. But in a corporate setting, complex queries are part of our daily business – they are just not supported by common search engines (only exception being data mining solutions). But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need it.

Where is the way out of this dilemma?

• Don’t tell, but SHOW the end-users how semantic technologies can enhance search & browse experiences
• Do not use terms like SPARQL or RDF
• Create a simple mockup that illustrates the points you want to make
• You’re not a designer? Use tools like Balsamiq – Try it now!

Here is an example for a mockup of a semantically enhanced expert finder:

These kind of mockups are essential for any requirements engineering phase in any project where search is a bit more than a text box, a button and a bunch of documents.

What has been in the shade for several months now steps brightly into the sun: Yahoo! is heavily turning towards the Semantic Web. The underlying open-search-strategy is based on putting a stronger focus on microformats and related metadata like Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS and MediaRSS but also RDFa and eRDF, embedded in HTML.

A recent Computerworld article from March 13, 2008 puts it like this:

Yahoo said that its support of standards such as microformats and RDF, or the Resource Description Framework, are aimed providing users with better search results by improving the understanding of content and the relationships among content.

[...]

Yahoo also announced that it will launch a beta tool to let third parties add data to Yahoo Search results within several weeks. For example, a restaurant could use this tool to add reviews or other data to Yahoo Search results for queries about the eatery. Developers can build enhanced results applications by accessing structured data that Yahoo will make available through public application programming interfaces and in its index. The structured data is available to Web site owners through feeds or the supported Semantic Web standards, Yahoo said.

Michael Arrington, a blogger at “TechCrunch,” wrote that Yahoo’s announcement means “we can expect the Web to get itself organized in a hurry. At stake is a significant amount of traffic from Yahoo search, and anyone that may choose to build applications on top of this data.”

In addition, Yahoo’s support for Semantic Web standards like RDF and microformats is the incentive Web sites need to adopt them, Arrington said.

“Instead of semantic silos scattered across the Web …Yahoo will be pulling all the semantic information together when available, as a search engine should,” he added. “Until now, there were few applications that demanded properly structured data from third parties. That changes today.”