1. 1 CIS607, Fall 2005 Semantic Information Integration Presentation by Jiawei Rong Week 10 (Nov. 30)

2. 2 Questions from Homework 8 General questions abouy the Semantic Web and semantic search. – The authors make a very simple observation: the current Web already does have relations -- the hyperlink. Maybe a more realistic Semantic Web is simply to add another dimension to a hyperlink, a "type" ? For example: Paea LePendu Paea LePendu -- Paea – According to The Semantic Webscape: A View of the Semantic Web by Juhnyoung Lee and Richard Goodwin (ACM 1-59593-051-5/05/0005), semantic Web pages is less than 0.0003% (as of 2003). And as of October 2004 the percentage increased 0.0009%. Do you think the semantic search will be practically useful in the near future? -- DongHwi

3. 3 Questions from Homework 8 (cont ’ d) About the approaches in this paper ? – What is "semantic negotiation" in the paragraph just above Section 4? Is it like namespace resolution? -- Paea – In page 707, we have two anchor nodes from which we have to choose the subgraph. Having chosen the subgraph, how can we decide the order in which to serialize this subgraph in the results presented to the users. -- DongHwi – A GetData query looks like a tuple or fact, not a query. How would you query: "everyone who was born in Paris, France?" Like: GetData(,birthplace) ? And the is what? A list of resources, one of which includes ? This is confusing syntax and is not type-safe. Seems to me like a better query interface for the Semantic Web, which is a set of 3-tuples (source, relation, target), would be (,, ) where any of the three resource values can be a variable such as: (?x, birthplace, ), or (, ?, ). -- Paea

4. 4 Questions from Homework 8 (cont ’ d) About the approaches in this paper ? (cont’d) – On page 8 (707), the simple heuristics for selecting the subgraph are explained. How does selecting at most N (or M) triples with the same source and same arc label improve performance? -- Shiwoong – How would semantic search be able to distinguish between navigational queries and research queries? Would the algorithm be different for the two? – Shiwoong – They seem to be assuming that the Semantic Web will have a very specific format...and they had to change the format of all the information in their domains before Semantic Search could figure it out. Is this realistic? – Amanda – Does it make sense to do a traditional text search on the actual query string and then let the user select the denotation that they wanted, and then run Semantic Search on that object? (Then I guess the question would be how to format the selection procedure so that the user understands the different denotations of the same string) -- Amanda

5. 5 Questions from Homework 8 (cont ’ d) Other questions. – The options listed in the ambiguity problem seem rather complex, in and of themselves. Any idea how they handled the solutions that they used? For example, user profiling is a major area of research - why no mention of what methods they used? I’m also really curious as to how they made the decisions as to what is contextually related? Did the future research get anywhere? – Enrico – In page 704, the authors mentioned HTML scrapers which locate and convert the relevant pages on a traditional website into machine readable data. How do they write this type of HTML scrapers? Using the title of the HTML pages as properties and the HTML pages as resources? Or they parse the HTML page to get the semantic relationship? In addition, I am wondering about the complexity of the job. Doesn’t it take a long time to write these HTML scrapers? -- Dayi – It seems to me that it is costly to update and maintain a semantic web and search system. With the improvement and competition of information retrieval techniques and flexible semantic markup, are there any other good reasons that we want to build a semantic search system? (The examples authors raised on P708 seem to be solvable by improving techniques for analyzing query strings, therefore it does not justify the necessary of building semantic webs.) -- Dayi

6. 6 Questions from Homework 8 (cont ’ d) Other questions. (cont’d) – How to establish the connection between images and texts (search term) in Semantic Web (through name, etc.)? Do we need image recognition for full automation? – Zebin – The experiments are done on W3C results by W3C users. Will the evaluation be different for different users/webs? Do we need domain-specific approaches? -- Zebin