•
In a recent post, I outlined a kind of layman's test for the Semantic Web . I wrote that the tipping point for the Semantic Web may be when anyone can query a set of data about a historical figure and get a long list of structured results in return. I called this 'The Modigliani Test,' after my favorite artist Amedeo Modigliani. To pass this test, you must deliver - using Linked Data - a comprehensive list of locations of original Modigliani art works around the world. A developer named Atanas Kiryakov gave the test a good crack. In doing so, he illustrated the core issues facing the Semantic Web currently. Sponsor The challenge of this test is that there isn't currently enough linked data on the Web about Modigliani. Also the key data in this test is the locations of art works, which probably isn't one of the main data fields for art data when it's uploaded to the Web (artist name and art work title would be the two key data fields). Kiryakov wasn't the only person who attempted to pass the test; and in fact his results mirror what can be found already on the popular open database Freebase . However Kiryakov, who is the Executive Director of Bulgarian Semantic Technology company Ontotext AD , did a great job of explaining his methodology and noting the issues he faced. The Current State of Linked Data Queries The result of Kiryakov's attempt is a relatively short list of locations of Modigliani paintings around the world. He admits that the list isn't long enough, but says that it's the closest he could get - not just because of the limited amount of data in the Linked Data Web, but because it's "hard to query and use today." Essentially Kiryakov created code to query a few known Linked Data sets, with custom manipulations to output location data. This is what he came up with: PREFIX fb: PREFIX dbpedia: PREFIX dbp-prop: PREFIX dbp-ont: PREFIX umbel-sc: PREFIX rdf: PREFIX ot: SELECT DISTINCT ?painting_l ?owner_l ?city_fb_con ?city_db_loc ?city_db_cit WHERE ?p fb:visual_art.artwork.artist dbpedia:Amedeo_Modigliani ; fb:visual_art.artwork.owners [ fb:visual_art.artwork_owner_relationship.owner ?ow ] ; ot:preferredLabel ?painting_l. ?ow ot:preferredLabel ?owner_l . OPTIONAL { ?ow fb:location.location.containedby [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_fb_con ] . OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-prop:location ?loc. ?loc rdf:type umbel-sc:City ; ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_loc OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-ont:city [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_cit ] } That query was executed in a tool called LDSR , a "Linked Data Semantic Repository" created by Kiryakov's company Ontotext. He calls LDSR a "search engine for part of the linked data web." Ontotext's LDSR includes data from existing Linked Data repositories such as DBPedia, Freebase, Geonames, UMBEL and Wordnet. Here is a screenshot of Atanas Kiryakov's attempt to pass the Modigliani Test. He spent over an hour formulating the code used to generate this result. As you can see, the resulting list was just 8 items long and most of the locations are in major U.S. cities. This falls well short of a comprehensive list of Modigliani art work locations. For example, there's no data about Modigliani paintings in Europe - where Modigliani lived all his life. Other Sources of Modiglidata Kiryakov wrote that most of the data returned in the Modigliani example came from Freebase . Indeed, as RWW commenter Brian Karlak pointed out in our original post, you can get much the same result within Freebase itself . Another commenter, Michael, pointed to a non-technical results page . Kiryakov's result has a little more data, but not much more. However the point of Kiryakov's attempt and blog post was to point out the difficulty of passing the Modigliani Test right now. He noted that "getting useful information from LOD [Linked Open Data] quite often requires a lot of efforts to analyze and post-process them in order to get reasonable answers to structured queries." In other words, it's much more than just inputting a natural language query (note that the Freebase example was provided by a user there named masouras , so it's not something an average user could do). I should also mention that in the comments to the previous post, Bruce Wayne pointed to his company Factoetum's effort to pass the test - which had 7 results, including some different ones to Ontotext/Freebase. Like Kiryakov, Wayne noted that it's "nearly impossible" for non technical people to use the current solutions. Finally, to address an issue that some commenters raised in the previous post: yes it would be possible to pass the Modigliani Test with some manual human effort to track down location data. But that's cheating - we want to see this done using Linked Data. And not just for Modigliani works, but for any other artist. Much Work to Be Done Atanas Kiryakov concluded that "there is still a lot of work to be done, because we cannot expect wide usage and interest in the Semantic Web if writing such a query takes more than an hour and a lot of technical knowledge." While that's true, I thank Atanas for giving the Modigliani Test a crack. At least now I know to visit the Museum of Modern Art when I next go to New York! Let us know your thoughts on the Modigliani Test in the comments. Or perhaps you're a developer willing to take on this challenge? Discuss
Read more here:
The Modigliani Test for Linked Data: Results
Tags:
artist,
freebase,
life,
Linked,
modern,
modigliani,
museum,
search-engine,
technology,
thoughts,
words
•
Last week after Twitter's Chirp conference, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asked Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams when we would begin to see the release of inactive and deleted Twitter usernames back into the wild. The answer turns out to be soon for some and later for others, but the question remains - how will we know when that name is finally available? Well, two developers, Blake Crosley and Luke Woodard , have jumped onto this goldrush and created TwitterClaims . Sponsor According to Sullivan, Twitter is still trying to figure out the proper way to handle the situation, as some usernames have been used but have recently sat inactive, while others were swept up in mass name claims by squatters and others still have simply been abandoned. (Sullivan notes an anecdote by Williams of one person who registered more than 10,000 names in one fell swoop but has done nothing with them.) So if you've been eyeballing that perfect Twitter username, just watching it sit there and do nothing, TwitterClaims claims to have the answer. Simply enter your email address and give the site up to ten names that you're looking forward to having and the service will email you when the name becomes available. The service checks once an hour to see if the name is available and once it is, it emails you to let you know. Simple. It looks like anyone can claim a name, so once it becomes available and the notifiction is set, it's on. You'll still have to get there first, and others can be getting the same notification about that same username. Discuss
Read the original post:
TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush
Tags:
been-eyeballing,
blake-crosley,
Danny Sullivan,
Evan Williams,
land rush,
looking-forward,
Luke Woodard,
name,
notifiction,
once-it-becomes,
Read,
search,
search-engine,
service-checks,
situation,
Twitter,
username,
watching-it-sit
•
In our recent posts about Structured Data , we've emphasized that most of the current initiatives have been around uploading new data to the Web - whatever the format. The U.S. and U.K. governments have led the way with their 'open data' websites, but much of that data isn't 'linked' yet . In other words, it's online - but siloed. So how do we get to the next stage of the Semantic Web, linking disparate data sets together so that people can begin to use that data? The tipping point for the long-awaited Semantic Web may be when you can query a set of data about someone not too famous, and get a long list of structured results in return. I've decided to term this 'The Modigliani Test.' Sponsor Amedeo Modigliani is one of my favorite artists. He was moderately famous during the early 20th century and has something of a cult following nowadays. But he's not Da Vinci or Picasso famous. What I'd like to do in a Semantic Web is type the following query into a search engine and get back a large list of results: tell me the locations of all the original paintings of Modigliani. As of today, there's no place to type that query in and get a list of structured data . The closest I can find to doing that is the Artcyclopedia entry for Modigliani, which has a list of locations for Modigliani artworks. It's great that they have the location data listed on one web page. However it's not structured data, so we can't query it. There's also not much order to the data, we have no idea if this is a comprehensive list, it's not verified data, and so on. In summary, there's a lot of data on the Web about the location of original art works - but much of it is in traditional 'document' web pages. What we're after is a giant database of art works, which anybody can query and re-use. Here's an early, overly geeky view at what a Linked Data of painting locations would look like (hat-tip @dakoller ): The above is a far from comprehensive list of art works by Hieronymus Bosch (a search for Modigliani, by the way, brought up zero results). Plus of course we need a much more intuitive UI, so that non-geeks can use it too. What do you think, when will The Modigliani Test be passed on the Web? Discuss
See the original post:
The Modigliani Test: The Semantic Web's Tipping Point
Tags:
amedeo modigliani,
following-query,
Hieronymus Bosch,
linked-data,
list,
location,
locations,
modigliani,
original art works,
search-engine,
semantic,
structured data,
U.K.,
U.S.,
web,
words
•
Bing now knows a lot more about cars and will also give a select group of users the option to compare the performance of different sports teams. Microsoft just announced these updates at the Search Engine Strategies event in New York. The new comparison answers for sports will be rolled out to only about 5% of Bing's users at first. In addition, Microsoft will also begin to roll out some minor design changes to a small group of users today that will better highlight Bing's assets like weather and travel search. Sponsor Starting today, mobile users will also see improvements to Bing's autosuggest feature, which will now include answers for things like stock quotes right in the autosuggest box. Domain Task Pages for Cars Whenever a user searches for cars and car-related topics (" 2010 Toyota Camry specs ," for example), Bing will now bring up a page will all of the car's specs instead of directing you to another site with this info. This page will also include links to additional images and videos about the car, as well as the ability to restrict the search query by different trims and links to the specs of cars in the same class. In Microsoft parlance, these pages are called "domain task pages" and chances are that - if successful - the company plans to roll out more of these for additional topics in the near future. The task pages are part of Bing's efforts to provide users with specialized answers for popular queries in verticals like weather . According to a recent job posting , other topics for these pages that Microsoft plans to launch in the future could include "movies, music, games and other high-volume domains." Given that Bing bills itself as a "decision engine," it only makes sense for Microsoft to try to capture as many popular searches as possible and present its users with relevant answers right on Bing.com instead of sending them on to other sites. Sports Comparison and UI Changes A small number of Bing users will now also be able to compare the performance of sports teams by simply typing the name of two teams in the search form. As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's Director of Bing, also told us during a briefing earlier this month, about 0.7% of all queries on Bing are comparison searches and the company hopes to capture more of these in the future and present the right answer in Bing instead of sending users to multiple sites. The same number of users (about 5%) will now also see a new user interface for the boxes at the top of the page that Bing will often display for popular topics. For searches related to cities and towns, for example, these "Bing boxes" will now include info about local weather, a relevant link to Bing Maps, as well as airfare info from your current location (based on your IP address). For popular artists, these boxes will now also include information about upcoming concerts and other relevant information. Sadly, this concert info is based on chronology and doesn't take a user's current location into account. Overall, these are interesting updates - not necessarily because Bing now knows a lot more about cars and sports, but because they show the direction the Bing team is going in. As a "decision engine," the Bing team's intend is to give users more information directly on the site instead of just presenting them with a couple of links. While these links can be relevant (and Bing still shows them most of the time, too), the Bing team wants to reduce the number of queries that result in links and increase the number of times the software can present users with direct answers Microsoft has sourced from its own databases or from sources across the Internet. Discuss
The rest is here:
Bing Keeps Getting Smarter: Adds More Info About Cars, Sports Teams
Tags:
Bing,
Bing Keeps,
Bing Maps,
comparison,
concert,
director,
future,
info,
Microsoft,
minor design changes,
New York,
number,
performance,
search,
search engine strategies,
search-engine,
Stefan Weitz,
toyota camry
•
It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think. We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google. Sponsor Guest author Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer and tech enthusiast, among other things. You can check out his latest musings in blog form at thechromesource , where he writes about Chrome browser, Chrome OS and just plain Google in general. Take a look at this graph from the Silicon Valley Insider that depicts the location of advertising and the dollars associated with it: Ever increasingly, Google is relying on itself to make money through its own real estate - places where it can position the ads that advertisers purchase. This is a concern for publishers that rely on Google for revenue through Adsense because there has to be a point at which this is no longer a profitable exercise for the company. If it reaches that point, Google will essentially be subsidizing publishers. And it may not have a choice but to keep doing so. Because without fresh content creation, what is there for users to search for on the Internet that is of value? The main tenet of the search business is to provide quality results, and while that may be the case now, if publisher's Adsense revenues were affected, one can wonder what kind of effect that would have on content. So although Google may have made some mistakes with applications like Buzz, along with the half-hearted emergence and now slow death of features like Gears, expect them to continue to increasing space for content to grow, even if that means one of several strategies: Become an ISP An experimental program has been announced whereby Google will provide gigabit service via fiber directly to homes in select markets. Interested municipalities and community organizations are encouraged to submit a proposal for this right . At the World Mobile Congress, CEO Eric Schmidt talked about the goal of this program being purely experimental, which means showing infrastructure operators such as cable companies that this is possible, rather than Google becoming a full fledged ISP. But once the fiber has been rolled out, it doesn't roll back in, does it? How long does the "experiment" last? Trounce the Competition in the Browser Wars Google's Chrome browser is getting a lucky break over the next few weeks. That's because Windows users in Europe who use Internet Explorer will be getting an update to their machines notifying them about browser choices that they have . This is in response to the European Union's ruling that Microsoft's practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows restricts competition. While the update offers many browser choices, the result will be a boost to market share for Chrome. It has steadily grown in popularity and already has roughly 5% of the market since emerging in 2008. Offer Computing Architecture to Device Manufacturers Completely Free We've seen this already with Android, and it appears that the no-cost operating system has basically saved Motorola from a fall to obscurity with its release of the Droid. Expect to see more of these developments as 2010 unfolds with Chrome OS attempting to break into not only the netbook market, but also tablets and smartbooks, which fill the gap between a high end mobile phone and a netbook. So when you hear these new announcements of applications and services that Google rolls out, think of content. Think of how they can better deliver information to users. They want it to be as easy and as seamless as possible. While sometimes these initiatives don't always work out, they aren't going to stop trying. Discuss
Read more here:
Why Google Releases New Apps: They're Desperate for Content
Tags:
browser,
Business,
Chrome,
congress,
Europe,
european,
european-union,
internet,
location,
Microsoft,
offer-computing,
search,
search-engine,
windows