中文XML论坛-- 《A Semantic Web Primer》作者 Frank van Harmelen 教授访谈

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中文版
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(本文编辑同志好心加了一段引言作为开头，可惜这部分问题多多，请大家将就一下了 )

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英文版
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> Question:
> The Semantic Web initiative is often said to address the same issues
> that have already been approached 30 years before, by means of knowledge
> representation and inductive logics in artificial intelligence. Systems
> such as KL-ONE or Cyc, Minsky's frames and Sowa's Conceptual Graphs are
> remnants of these ancestral efforts. But they have failed. What makes
> the Semantic Web, along with its focus on ontologies and reasoning, so
> different from these futile endeavours?

There is indeed a widespread misconception that the Semantic Web is "AI
all over again". Even though the two may have some of their tools in
common (ontologies, reasoning, logic), the goals of the two programmes
are entirely different. In fact, the goals of the Semantic Web are much
more modest: the Semantic Web is *not* out to build a general purpose
all encompassing global internet-based intelligence. The goal is instead
much more technical and modest: to achieve interoperability between
datasets that are exposed to the web (whether they are structured,
unstructured or semi-structured data). Tim Berners-Lee devoted an
entire presentation to the confusion between AI and Semantic Web in July
last year: http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0718-aaai-tbl/Overview.html The
summary of his presentation is:
- The Semantic Web is not AI and AI is not the Semantic Web
- AI is a field; SW is a project
- The Semantic Web owes a debt to AI because it uses some of its tools
- The Semantic Web should be a great playground for AI
That same presentation also does a very good job of busting some of the
other false myths surrounding the Semantic Web, such as that the
Semantic Web is (only, mainly) concerned with hand-annotated
text-documents, or that the Semantic Web requires a single universal
ontology to be adopted by all.

> Question:
> Web 2.0 appears to be the new kid on the block - everybody's darling,
> loved both by academia and industry. The Semantic Web, on the other
> hand, has fallen from grace, owing to numerous unmet promises. How do
> you regard the coexistence of these two Webs and what role will Web 2.0
> assume in the Semantic Web's story?

Notice that the question states a false premisse, namely that "the Semantic
Web has fallen from grace, owing to numerous unmet promises".
Instead, let's take a look at some facts and figures:
The SemTech conference, an industry oriented event organised in the past
3 years in San Jose, California, attracted 300 attendants 2 years ago,
500 attendants last year, and 700+ attendants this year. Its European
counterpart, The European Semantic Technologies Conference attracted
200+ attendants to its first event, last May in Vienna, of which
75% from companies. So, either your question is wrong, or many hundreds
of business people and dozens of companies are all wrong. You choose.

Rather on the contrary, Semantic Technologies are in the process of
an industrial breakthrough. Here is a quote from a recent
(May 2007) Gartner report, the industry watcher not known for its love of
shortlived hypes:

"Key finding: During the next 10 years, Web-based technologies will
  improve the ability to embed semantic structures in documents, and
  create structured vocabularies and ontologies to define terms, concepts
  and relationships. This will offer extraordinary advances in the
  visibility and exploitation of information - especially in the
  ability of systems to interpret documents and infer meaning without
  human intervention."

Fortunately, Gartner is wise enough not to declare early failure (as
your question does), but knows how long these things take:

"the grand vision of the Semantic Web will occur in multiple
evolutionary steps, and small-scale initiatives are often the best
starting points."

Turning to the substance of your question:
There is widespread agreement in the research world that Web2.0 and
Semantic Web (or: Web3.0) are complimentary, not competing. This was
for example the finding of a science panel at the WWW07 conference in May
last year in Edinburgh. The concensus is that Web2.0 has a low threshold
(it's easy to start using it), but also has a low ceiling (folksonomies
only get you so far), while Web3.0 has a higher threshold (higher
startup investments), but has a much higher ceiling (more is possible).

The aforementioned Gartner report also has useful things to say here. It
advises the *combination* of Semantic Web with Web2.0 techniques, and
predicts a gradual growth path from the current web via semantically
lightweight but easy to use Web2.0 techniques to
higher-cost/higher-yield Web3.0 techniques.

> Question:
> And what about automated means of learning ontologies,
> relationships between entities, and so forth - that is, resorting to
> natural language processing, text mining, and statistical means of
> knowledge extraction and inference. Do you regard these techniques as
> complementary to the manual composition of ontologies or rather
> inhibitory? Do you believe that these techniques actually make sense
> as an accumulator or are they "bound to fail"?

My attitude towards the acquisition of ontologies and the classification
of data-objects in these ontologies is: if it works, it's fine. Clearly
relying only on manual construction of ontologies puts a high cost and
low ceiling on the volume of knowledge that can be coded and
classified. Hence, I expect that the techniques that you mention
will play an ever bigger role in the gammut of semantic technologies. I
see no reason why such techniques are "bound to fail", instead I am
rather optimistic about their increasingly valuable contribution.

> Question:
> All great technological inventions and milestones are marked by the
> advent of a killer application. What could/will be the Semantic Web's
> killer app? Will there be one at all?

I find the perennial question for the "killer app" always a bit
naive. For example: can we agree that the widespread adoptation of XML is
an important technical innovation? But what was XML's "killer app"? Was
there a single one? No. There are just many places where XML facilitates
progress "under the hood"? Semantic Web technology is primarily
*infrastructure* technology. And infrastructure technology is under the
hood, not directly visible for users. You will simply notice websites
becoming more personalised (because under the hood semantic web
technology allows your personal interest profile to be interoperable
with the data-sources of the web-site), or you will simply notice search
engines doing better clustering of results (because under the hood they
have classified search results in a meaningful ontology), or you will
simply notice your desk-top search tool being able to link author names
of documents with email addresses in your address-book (because under
the hood, these data-formats have been made to interoperate by exposing
their semantics), but none of these applications will have "Semantic Web
technology" written on their interface. Semantic Web technology is like
Nikasil coating in the cylinders of your car: very few car drivers are
aware of it, but they are aware of reduced fuel consumption, higher top
speeds and extended lifetime of the engine. Semantic Web technology is
the Nikasil of the next generation of humanfriendly computer
applications that are being developed right now.

[此贴子已经被作者于2010-11-18 14:25:10编辑过]


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