Mehmet Ali Ertürk » Semantic Web

Google and Future of the Semantic Web

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:11:43 +0000

Yesterday, Google announced support for lightweight semantic markups; RDFa and microformats which is a big issue for the future of web and also know as semantic web. Yahoo has been making experiments with RDFa and microformats with their new search engine called search monkey. I assume Microsoft’ Live and Powerset will add same (may be full RDF) support soon.

So, the important point is; it is a big push to the current web to shape it more meaningful way. Why should a market dominant do it? Google search engine is powered with NLP (Natural Language Processing) and it works very well but it may be useless when compared future data on the web. NLP is a powerful technique which is aimed to translate spoken languages to machine ones to process, analyze and use it. There are many languages in the world which Google has to deal them separately and it is doing it very well. So, what is the challenge? It is social networks.

It is easy to manage your web site or web page content by yourself and ensure that it is well formed and correct for search engines. However, it is impossible to manage user distributed data over social networks. And, the easiest way to do it; add semantics to the content which will help search engines (or whatever you have) to process it.

I guess this push will improve the feature of the web and also semantic web. It seems we are going to see more tools, libraries, frameworks built in support for RDFa and microformats.

RDFa, Google (ivan-herman.name)
Google Takes Steps Towards A More Structured Web (techcrunch.com)

Tell Me Again, What was The Semantic Web?

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:28:56 +0000

My semantic web interest is almost two years old however, I haven’t focused it enough till this year. It was something like a magazine or a blog that I like to read or follow but never involved. Somehow, my viewpoint on semantic web extremely changed and I’ve started scientific (also business) researches on semantic web.

Today, I felt much better when I saw the following videos. It was a right choice to make investments on semantic web. I hope, it will much better… Thanks Cas for sharing these nice videos:

Future Internet Video from Castemelijn on Vimeo

Impressed Kevin Kelly’s presentation and the quote about web: “Have to get better in believing the impossible”

Tomorrow, I have a meeting with my advisers about Semantic Web for P2P networks and if it goes successfully, I’ll start build my project in the following weeks. First, I want to up and running simplest p2p network in my local machine using twisted on python or jxta on java. Then give this thing a mining: semantic …

Turkey Semantic Web Research Group

admin — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:31:15 +0000

I’ve been thinking to start a new research group in my new university for Semantic Web Researches till I start my graduate program. I can’t find enough people who really know what Semantic Web is then I let it go. … Continue reading →

Ontology Learning Techniques

admin — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:26:15 +0000

As I planned, finalizing my (quick) studies on ontology learning techniques. Ontologies play a key role in semantic web and technologies by defining concepts and relations between these concepts. Thus, there are significant studies on this subject and some useful techniques discussed in ontology learning:

Ontology learning from texts
Ontology learning from dictionary
Ontology learning from knowledge base
Ontology learning from semi-structured schemata
Ontology learning from relational schemata

Almost all of the techniques above require a good knowledge and infrastructure of NLP (Natural Language Processing) to obtain effective results. I though ontology learning from dictionary would be easy compared to other methods for Turkish language. However, it requires WordNet like dictionaries that what I don’t have. Sabancı University NLP group works on BalkanNet but I don’t think it is ready to use.

Also, I’m searching about ontology-based system designs and implementations.

Reference
http://www.sti-innsbruck.at/fileadmin/documents/deliverables/Ontoweb/D1.5.pdf

Trends in Ontology-Based Systems

admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:56:47 +0000

When I first see the book “Semantic Web Technologies: Trends and research in ontology-based systems (Hardcover)” hadn’t enough time to go on the previous week. This, morning I couldn’t sleep and so had some free time to search http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/. The query “Ontology-Based” in titles hit 100 papers and most of them are published in 2008 or 2007. I’ve got printed copies of studies from various versions of ontology based systems like “Ontology-Based Knowledge Management”,” Ontology-based Information Integration in Virtual Learning Environment”, ”An Ontology-based Approach to Text Summarization” … etc.

My adviser already has a proposal on multimedia related systems and suggests me to consider it. I may combine those studies with ontology based infrastructure and come up with new subjects. But still an idea …

I’m listed in Semantic Web Twitter Pack as Semantic Web people to follow in twitter. Thanks to @CleverClogs

My Red Alert 3 Strategies

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:03:25 +0000

After, Red Alert 2 I’m getting familiar with Red Alert 3 (RA3) and enjoying the game when I win Japanese forces. My favorite nation in the game is Russians. Yes, I like to hear the sound “Kirov Reporting!”. My main strategy in the game is;

Barracks
Train soldiers (mixed)
Power Planet
2 Ore Mines
War Factory
Super Reactor

I always follow my opponent’s movements and decide how to strike. It may air, ground or super weapon attack.

I’m not just playing games but reading papers on machine learning techniques which are used in ontology learning for semantic web. Also, I’m preparing a schedule for 2009 conferences and our plan is to have something valuable till April so, we can submit it this year’s events.

Ontology Learning

admin — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:14:56 +0000

I blogged before about semantic web research topics which I’ve been interested in. While I have a little free time I planned to focus on ontology learning. I know it is a big issue and cannot be handled in a tiny time span. However, at least, I can write a review on ontology learning techniques such as machine learning and machine language translation techniques that would be useful to decide to go on this subject.

I’m still trying to make a decision to apply this internship or not.

I’m Free For a While

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:05:48 +0000

I woke up at 4:30 am last night and it is about to 2:00 am. Yes, It makes a lot of time. I was dealing with graduate studies for last two weeks and I’ve completed most important part this night. I made a paper submission to local conference in Turkey which will be held at Harran Uni. Only a few final exams left which are not a big issue to handle.So, I’m free for a while and my plan is to complete the following todo list:

specify my theses subject ( probably on semantic web)
focus on some important (and funny) projects.
blog more about python(python euro ) and semantic web
practice some Red Alert 3 against Japanese
add new things to this todo list

Trying to figure out Is it possible to say “free for a while” while having this list.

Why didn’t I quit and sleep instead of blogging?

Semantic Web ~ Web 3.0

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:37:55 +0000

Web 2.0 makes our life easier day by day and lets us to access any information whenever and wherever we are with simple internet clients.

On the other hand, user contributed data (social media & networks) grows enormously so, we have to spend our time by eliminate unnecessary data and pick up useful ones. There are two ways to handle this situation; intelligent applications or meaningful data. When we consider development and maintaining costs intelligent applications would be a failure. Giving meaning to data seems more applicable, at this point semantic web plays the role.

By definition;

Semantic web is the extension of the current web which delivers extra information
in well formed machine readable structure.

Web 2.0 is the new way of delivering information with user friendly designs, web services,
social networks, blogs, videos … etc.

Web 3.0 is the evolution of the Web 2.0.

Actually, Web 3.0 is going to be integration of social media with semantic web; adding semantic structure to user contributed data.

So, if you have machine readable data, smart agents can be developed to handle daily tasks you have to do. For example, if you need to buy a book, let it to be done by your agent. It will seek and find the cheapest book and give an order for you. It is not only for machines, it might change the way we surf the web. For example, semantic web for e-government projects aim to provide all necessary information in one place (website).

However, it might have some issues like security and privacy. Also, semantic structures will result in the rise of agents and new types of spams.

Semantic Web research areas have been increasing and spreading and more companies investing for theses technologies. I hope I can take part in these research projects and develop something useful.

Possible Semantic Web Research Topics

admin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:21:34 +0000

I’ve tried to predict semantic web hot topics and feature trends in my recent posts. Plan was eliminate some of topics according to my interests and make a decision during this holiday. First part of plan worked well but, unexpected things happened; I got cold and spent all my holiday (1 week) in the bed. If I hadn’t been sick I was going to search these 4 topics;

Ontology Learning and Metadata Generation (e.g., HLT and ML approaches)
Semantics in P2P Computing
Semantic Web for e-Business, e-Science, e-Health, e-Culture, e-Government, e-Learning and other application domains
Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web

We’ve decided these topics during the meeting before the holiday with my advisers from both ex and new university. In my opinion these are more promising and familiar to me but I still can change it whatever I like and any help will be applicable.

Tomorrow night, I will be leaving from Konya and will be at the office Monday morning in İstanbul.