Two Semantic Web visions: meaningful data or meaningful text?
By Tim Finin on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 1:00 pm.One of the minor frustrations about working on the Semantic Web is that most people imagine the phrase to mean something other than the idea we’re working toward. The W3C vision is a Web of data published in RDF and supported by RDF and OWL ontologies and accessed by programs and agents. Scratch a random Web user, however, and you are likely to find someone who is imagines a Google like system that understands the full meaning of both the queries people type in and the conventional Web pages it indexes. Such a system would be wonderful, but it’s an ambitious project that will take decades or even generations to fully achieve. But maybe we can already build something that understands some of the meaning of natural language text in queries and on Web pages.
Hakia is yet another startup trying to build a better search engine that tries to capture a bit more of the meaning.
“hakia is building the Web’s first “meaning-based” search engine, one that will bring answers and meaningful results to questions on any topic. To achieve this goal, hakia uses a proprietary semantic system instead of a conventional index. Meaning-based search will appeal to all Web searchers - especially those engaged in research on complicated subjects, such as medicine, law, finance, science, and literature. hakia engine is designed to evolve and improve its capabilities with each user interaction and by crawling the Web.”
Is it any good? Well, some of the queries I tried showed some promise but often typing the same query into Google did just as well.
- Q: is tylenol linked to heart problems? A: hakia, Google
- Q: how long should shrimp be boiled, A: hakia, Google
- Q: does ruby have mutable strings? A: hakia, Google
- Q: is it legal to rip copy protected cds, A: hakia, Google
- Q: What US zip code has the largest population of canadian citizens, A: hakia,
Google
A system like hakia, if gotten right, would certainly be useful, but is not likely to meet the goals of the W3C’s Semantic Web vision in my lifetime.
Related posts: • Semantic web as the “web of data”; • The Semantic Naturalist: Ecoinformatics meets Semantic Web; • FieldMarking: creating the global human sensor net;
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