Identity, Identifiers, Identification Workshop: Some Introductory Remarks

Harry Halpin, <hhalpin -(a)- ibiblio.org>

RDF

I3 Workshop: Identity, Identifiers, Identification, May 2007

The Problem

search

Two Approaches to Information Management

Searched for by using unique IDs to access relevant entities and build their profiles by gathering what the Web has to offer about these entities.
Document-Centric Entity-Centric
keyword-based ID-based
document-centric entity-centric
ranking-dependent searches profile-dependent views
Users will find what they need by opening and reading through ocuments in the long list.

Search Architecture in the Future?

search architecture

Technologies

Goal of I3 Workshop

Schedule

Paolo Bouquet and Harry Halpin Welcome and Introduction 9:00:00 9:30:00
Christo Dichev, Darina Dicheva and Jan Fischer Identity: How to name it, How to find it 9:30:00 10:00:00
Aidan Hogan, Andreas Harth and Stefan Decker Performing Object Consolidation on the Semantic Web Data Graph 10:00:00 10:30:00
Raphael Volz, Joachim Kleb and Wolfgang Muller Towards ontology-based disambiguation of geographical identifiers 10:30:00 11:00:00
Paolo Bouquet, Heiko Stoermer and Daniel Giacomuzzi OKKAM: Enabling a Web of Entities 11:00:00 11:30:00
Invited Speaker: Pierre Levy IEML, a candidate for the future semantic coordinate system of cyberspace11:30:00 12:30:00
Discussion 12:30:00 13:00:00
Lunch Break 13:00:00 14:00:00
Jiahui Liu, Earl Wagner and Larry Birnbaum Compare&Contrast: Using the Web to Discover Comparable Cases for News Stories 14:00:00 14:30:00
Aditya Sehgal and Padmini Srinivasan Profiling Topics on the Web 14:30:00 15:00:00
Valentina Presutti and Aldo Gangemi A grounded ontology for identity and reference of web 15:00:00 15:30:00
Werner Ceusters and Barry SmithReferent Tracking and its Applications 15:30:00 16:00:00
Invited Speaker: Alan RuttenbergReport on Ongoing work16:00:00 16:30:00
Discussion and Brainstorming 16:30:00 17:30:00
Wrap-Up 17:30:00 17:45:00

The Web 2.0

The Web as a Totalizing System

Increasingly all data is on the Web: a universal information space

TimBL

The "Web 2.0" is the use of the Web as a platform for applications, a universal computation space

What is the break point for the full realization of the Web?

Centralized Search?

How to Search!

Opposing Methodologies

  1. Authors make their data explicit
  2. Applications scrape the implicit data

Peter Norvig: We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step.

The Semantic Web is about Meaning

It's about connecting the World Wide Web to the meaning of the wide world outside the web.

process

It's a tricky problem, but how can we say that our representations on the Web have no meaning?

TimBL: You don't want statistics or tagging running your banking account!

Where's the Semantics in the Semantic Web?

The semantics are grounded in logical models, not machine-enabled perception or cognition, with the mapping from useful domains to models done by humans.

Logical semantics are not derivative once they are inside the machines, as the semantics of the machine operation is independent of the human and the machine once it in the model...

logic

The Semantic Web is Augmentation!

The Semantic Web is not about replicating human intelligence. The Semantic Web is about augmentation and so "keeping humans in the loop."

Doug Engelbart

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity....

by "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.

Wikia Search

Wikia Search

The Future...

Can we build off of social search engines?

How about microformats, as in GRDDL and Technorati's Microformat Search?

Semantic Wikipedia

Can we provide trusted search, through Semantic Rules and policy?

Can we use RDF as a transport layer amongst decentralized search engines?

In concert with Wikia search? Semantic Wikipedia?

Why shouldn't the Semantic Web tackle the world's biggest problem: Search on the Web, in a decentralized manner?