Semantic web finally here?
The news is that Twine.com is about to release. If they actually pull “it” off, I think this could revolutionize the way organizations and groups use information. “It” is the oft-promised “semantic web”: using the MEANING of information to map relationships among topics and people. The Twine people call this mapping the “semantic graph”, of which Facebook’s “social graph” concept is (merely) a subset.
Example: let’s say I’m working on a project called BlueSchoolhouse with 5 other volunteers to help out a middle school in remote Guatemala. Over the course of a month on the web I create or stumble upon 50 news stories or documents or blog posts or websites or emails that are relevant to BlueSchoolhouse. As I create or stumble upon these 50 items I click to add them to a “twine” called BlueSchoolhouse (via a Twine button installed on my browser). And each of my 5 co-volunteers adds their own 30 or50 items to the BlueSchoolhouse twine via their own Twine browser button.
The Twine system uses semantic algorithms to determine the MEANING of the hundreds of BlueSchoolhouse items our team Twined. Based on MEANING (not just keywords), Twine auto-tags the items and maps (i.e. “graphs“) the relationships among the items and the team. So if I want to know what our team’s latest thinking is on how best to show the students how to use social networks, I can go to the BlueSchoolhouse twine and click on the tags for “Facebook” or “social networking” or “Orkut” or “friends” and I can quickly browse within the meaning-structured twine.
This is reminiscent of del.icio.us and other social bookmarking systems, and of Google’s algorithms for search relevance. But Twine is conceptually way way better in two key respects:
(1) the tagging is done automatically by Twine; individuals aren’t troubled to do the tagging;
(2) the information is not analyzed merely by (key)words but by meaning.
The big question is how well do Twine’s semantic algorithms work - it’s not released yet. If Twine works well, then Google will have no choice but to buy them for a hefty sum. If not, the quest for the Holy Grail of the semantic web continues.
wayt
Make A Comment: ( 1 so far )
One Response to “Semantic web finally here?”
tim sweeney
October 22nd, 2007
all sounds good but have they actually had a technological breakthrough? can they truly enable algorithmic sentiment and linguistic analysis? people have been chasing this holy grail since pre-Web times.