Social Networking, Semantic Searching and Science « Dennis’ Blog

I recently ran into this article on Denni’s blog. It’s a very well written article.

Perhaps its my naivete but I think the answer to some parts of the questions (reproduced below) lies in looking at articles that have cited a given article (to look forward) and look at references within the article (to look back). With this information you might be able to deduce the research path, who has built upon your findings (if the article is yours) and what those findings were. Once you know the ‘who’ information, you can then possibly look up their author information to find out if they are ’stars’ in that area.

I don’t think that alone answers it but the answers should lie hidden within information we already have in our current online publications and some of the concepts he describes within this entry. An excellent read without doubt.

Questions from the blog entry

1. “I’m researching topic X. What are the seminal papers in this area? Who are the primary researchers whose work I shoud read?”

2. “Ten years ago I published a paper on topic Y, then got distracted by grant funding in another area. I’d like to understand the full ‘intellectual lineage’ of this paper, now that others have had a chance to chew on it. What has it lead to? Have questions been answered? Have new ones emerged?”

3. “Who are the currently active researchers working on topics most closely related to my own research? Are there any bright new stars whose work I should keep an eye on?”

Read this at  http://brainoids.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/social-networking-semantic-searching-and-science/

British Search Engine ‘Could Rival Google’

So hears another semantic search engine wolframalpha.com that’s apparently launching in May 2009.  Should remember to check it out.

So how does Wolfram|Alpha intend to surpass current search engines in terms of relevance? Or does the team believe it can offer something completely different and innovative?

Wolfram|Alpha is designed on the principle that current search engines rely too heavily on their vast databases of indexed pages; they simply make a best guess based on search criteria and serve up some hopefully relevant results.

By working with a search engine that understands natural language instead, Stephen Wolfram intends to closely understand people’s questions and answer them directly. He remarks that, “It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers—it doesn’t merely look them up in a big database.”

Hakia for semantic search

Read this article on how semantic search engines are returning better results based on “meaning match”

I checked out the search engine they reference – Hakia. I tried out some basic searches and like how the results are all well organized so i can find what i want based on the context of my search. Of course this is just early experimentation but i assume researchers will find this very helpful

Ontologies come of age

I’ll get to the summary of what’s in here and my thoughts… but I want to keep it on here so i know to comment on it eventually

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-mit-press-(with-citation).htm

ReadWrite on The Road to semantic Web – Nov 2006

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_web_road.php

Primer on Notation3 (N3)

http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer

The source of all Semantic Web information

As soon as i read up on everything here and memorize – http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ – I will be a semantic web guru…

Easy!!!!

Ontologies/Schema for the Semantic Web – brief explanation

This is a very nice explanation from http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long

there’s no way for a computer or human to figure out what a specific term means, or how it should be used. The use of all these URIs is useless if we never describe what they mean. This is where schemas and ontologies come in. A schema and an ontology are ways to describe the meaning and realtionships of terms. This description (in RDF, of course) helps computer systems use terms more easily, and decide how to convert between them.

More sematic web reading stuff

So i found an article (third one listed below) and it pointed me to another as pre-read (the second one below) which in turn points me to a high level (first one below). So i’m going to read in this sequence and get sematic-fied.. (Free dictionary meaning of semantic)

1. High level
2. Semantic Web in breadth
3. Semantic Web – An Intro

And then there’s one for developers

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

More semantic web jargon to be familiar with. Again explained much better on Wikipedia. Here’s my understanding.

RDF is a way to model metadata and i think it offers a way to explain relationship between web resources. The example in Wikipedia is “sky has the color blue”. They say it gives information in ‘triples‘ (RDF terminology) or as subject-predicate-object. i.e. sky is the subject, has the color is the predicate and object is blue.

I’m going to try an example of my own here – IT helps to serve banking. So i guess if a machine was to get a user request for IT information, it will understand the relationship based on users interest in banking (possibly through some kind of profile information) to offer results specific to IT as it relates to banking. No guarantees that this is right. I’m just guessing. I’ll probably get it in like 50 years.

Lots more to read up on this. Also need to read up about RDF Schema (RDFS) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). Familiarize with other Ontology Languages. Good heavens – Turtle, N-Triples!!! When am i ever going to know everything there is to know about the Semantic web….

More later