[Taxacom] taxonomy and the future of web based tools

[Donat Agosti]

In today's NY Times is an article about web3.0, not web2.0, claiming that
the industry is picking up this development

 

I would argue, that this means that to be part of this future, we must make
sure that all our information (publications, databases. Etc) will be open
and available so can take profit of this development.. At that point, we
can't rely on email sent pdfs, but really ought to be able to provide access
to our information so somebody could ask questions such as "are ants really
declining above 1600 meters above sea level in the tropics and  are there
general patterns involved?"

 

Generally, the technology evolves much faster that our behavior, so we might
be look into some changes on our side.?

 

Donat

 

 

November 12, 2006


Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense 


By JOHN MARKOFF
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_markoff/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> 

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 - From the billions of documents that form the World
Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a
growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human
intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that
would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide - and even provide the
foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of
artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply
following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has
given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the
underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like
I.B.M.
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=IBM>  and Google
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=GOOG>  as well as
small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from
producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in
areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping
out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting,
with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college. 

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly
powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

"I call it the World Wide Database," said Nova Spivack, the founder of a
start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of
information by mining the World Wide Web. "We are going from a Web of
connected documents to a Web of connected data."

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications
(like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the
Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in
Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 - or the "semantic Web,"
for the idea of adding meaning - is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the "mash-up" - for example,
connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more
useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a
system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question
like: "I'm looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of
$3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child." 

Under today's system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting - through
lists of flights, hotel, car rentals - and the options are often at odds
with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a
complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been
assembled by a human travel agent.

How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing
meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic
researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a
vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing
pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.

But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more
commercially valuable than today's search engines, which return thousands or
even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily
profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as
"Page Rank," systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about
what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one
page to another as a "vote," but votes cast by pages considered popular are
weighted more heavily.)

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack's company, Radar
Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of
social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and
adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar's technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores
associations, such as one person's relationship to another (colleague,
friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers. 

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a
project by a group of University of Washington
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/univers
ity_of_washington/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  faculty members and students
that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the
technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted
information from product and review sites. 

One demonstration project focusing on hotels "understands" concepts like
room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between
concepts like "great," "almost great" and "mostly O.K." to provide useful
direct answers. Whereas today's travel recommendation sites force people to
weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the
Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by
cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

"The system will know that spotless is better than clean," said Oren
Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of
Washington who is a leader of the project. "There is the growing realization
that text on the Web is a tremendous resource."

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase,
with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those
who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will
start to do seemingly intelligent things. 

Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will
be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the
content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch
for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and
locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending
birth of Web 3.0.

"It's a hot topic, and people haven't realized this spooky thing about how
much they are depending on A.I.," said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran
artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here
last year. 

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its
service or product will be, though the company's Web site states that
Metaweb intends to "build a better infrastructure for the Web."

"It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to
machines than it ever was before," Mr. Hillis said.

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology
development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies.
Early research financed by the National Security
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/nationa
l_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Agency, the Central
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central
_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Intelligence Agency and the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a
semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide
Web a decade earlier.

Intelligence agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a
computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and
services to the government and large corporations. For the last
quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system
named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed
in spoken or written language - and to reason.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the
computer system would "learn." But in a lecture given at Google earlier this
year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web - a
process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a
sophisticated natural-language query like: "Which American city would be
most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?"

Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital
snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic
World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate
customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.'s Almaden Research Center in San
Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been
used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance
company and was able to choose between the terms "utility computing" and
"grid computing," for an I.B.M. branding effort. 

"It turned out that only geeks liked the term 'grid computing,' " he said.

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on
the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said.
Additionally, by mining the "buzz" on college music Web sites, the
researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop
charts in the next two weeks - a capability more impressive than today's
market research predictions.

There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force
behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic
fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the
existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in
services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing
systems acquired by Yahoo
<http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.m
arketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=YHOO> , and Digg,
a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find
stories of interest.

In Flickr, for example, users "tag" photos, making it simple to identify
images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.

"With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find," said
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. "Something that defied us for
50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn't have become trivial without
the Web."

 

 

Dr. Donat Agosti

Science Consultant

Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History and Naturmuseum der
Burgergemeinde Bern

Email: agosti at amnh.org

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