of overlapping interests with our ontology work... link to the EE
article is at the bottom.
--- peterd
-----Forwarded Message-----
> From: Frank Manola <>
> To: Graham Klyne <>
> Cc: Arjohn Kampman <>,
> Subject: Re: EE Times - Sony lab tips 'emergent semantics' to make
> sense of Web
> Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 09:39:45 -0500
>
>
>
>
> A couple of comments
>
> Graham Klyne wrote:
> >
> > I saw this (or a version of it), and had two leading thoughts:
> >
> > 1. The new technology was presented as a competitor to the Semantic
> Web
> > technologies, in a way which suggests to me a mistaken (or, at
> least,
> > very narrow) view of what Semantic Web technology is about. To my
> view,
> > a system that can perform automatic ontology extraction/generation
> is a
> > natural complement to the W3C raft of technologies (if it works).
> > There's nothing in OWL and RDF, for example, that demands that
> > application developers do ontological markup by hand, or that such
> > information be embedded into all data sources. I quite frequently
> > stumble across projects to interpret existing data sources/formats
> as
> > RDF (e.g. the calendaring task force work to interpret iCalendar
> data,
> > various proposals to present relational database information as RDF,
> etc.).
>
> I think this is the correct view. Part of the problem is that lots of
> discussions of the Semantic Web (and its "competitors") cast this as
> being somehow all one technique vs. all of another. IMO, the Semantic
> Web, per se, doesn't really care how the semantic information is
> acquired, just that it's there, and is available to programs that want
> to process Web information. All available sources of such information
> clearly need to be exploited, which includes emergent semantics.
> However, this information also includes definitions that already exist
> in database schemas, industry nomenclatures of various sorts, and so
> on
> (and emergent semantics might help in amplifying such information as
> well). One of the things that such articles indicate is that there's
> clearly a lot more work needed to accurately convey what the Semantic
> Web is about to a wider community!
>
> >
> > 2. Sony's new technology has apparently just been patented. Which I
> > think kills it dead in the water as a potential replacement for RDF,
> OWL
> > and friends. The level of fundamental infrastructure needs to be
> > completely free and open to survive as such, IMO.
>
> This sort of depends on what the patented technology actually does.
> For
> example, it seems to me that any semantics that emerges from
> conversations between agents needs to be captured in some concrete
> form,
> so that it doesn't have to be rederived for each conversation, and can
> be used as a building block for further communication. The concrete
> form might very well be OWL, or some amplification thereof. The
> detailed processes by which the semantics derivation is performed
> might,
> on the other hand, be patentable.
>
> --Frank
>
> >
> > #g
> > --
> >
> > At 10:23 05/11/04 +0100, Arjohn Kampman wrote:
> >
> >> Someone just notified me of the following article on EE Times:
> >>
> >> http://www.eetimes.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51201131
> >>
> >> "As the World Wide Web Consortium hammers out specifications on how
> to
> >> recode the databases of the world so that natural-language queries
> can
> >> be intelligently answered online, Sony Corp. says it has found a
> better
> >> way."
> >>
> >> Don't know what to think of this article. Is it for real? Comments,
> >> anyone?
> >>
> >> Arjohn
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >> Aduna BV - http://aduna.biz/
> >> Prinses Julianaplein 14-b, 3817 CS Amersfoort, The Netherlands
> >> tel. +31-(0)33-4659987 fax. +31-(0)33-4659987
> >
> >
> > ------------
> > Graham Klyne
> > For email:
> > http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
> >
> >
> >
>
