Semantic Web and the Perfect Search

1. Semantic Web and thePerfect Search By: Nolan Smith

2. Semantic Web • Tim Berners-Lee started semantic web around 1998 or so, and quickly gained the attention of an increasing circle of people. • The SemWeb was originally supposed to give the web the “smarts” it lacked and much of the early work on it dealt with calendaring, scheduling, and expressing relationships between people.

3. Semantic Web (cont’d) • Purpose: provide an easier way to find things on the web. • Executes complex tasks built upon finding things such as • scheduling a meeting • planning a trip • organizing a wedding • Etc.

4. Semantic Web (cont’d) • Example from reading: • If A is a friend of B, then B is a friend of A. • Prof Babu has a friend named Nolan • Therefore, Nolan has a friend named Prof. Babu • So if I find a statement on Prof. Babu’s web site that says, “Prof. Babu is a friend of Nolan” and someone does a search for Nolan’s friends, even if Nolan’s web site doesn’t mention Prof. Babu, we know Prof. Babu considers himself a friend of Nolan.

5. Search for Perfection • Rise of Semantic Web: the tagging of information so as to make it more easily found. • Other Improvements: • Ubiquity: the integration of more and more information into the web indexes. • Personalized search: the application of your personal Web toward a more perfect answer. • Domain specific search. • Web time axis.

6. Ubiquity • Critical to perfect search • Means nothing if the search engine does not understand your likes and dislikes. • Gives every piece of information, such as music or books, and index which makes it easier to find • Example • Napster: millions of people ripped copies of their favorite music to the Web. • It became much easier to find any song on the Web

7. Personalized Search • Local search = personalized search • Google’s version of local has two inputs: • The search term itself • A bit of local information (i.e. zip code or town name) • Example • Searching for basketball tickets • Search will return tickets in Durham not Russia

8. Domain specific search • Battelle states “Domain specific search solutions focus on one area of knowledge, creating customized search experiences that, because of the domain’s limited corpus and clear relationships between concepts, provide extremely relevant results for searchers” (274). • Domain specific search only searches for things within a specific area, such as cars or computers • Example based on what we’ve learned about Ubiquity and Domain Specific Search • When I search for “Jaguar”, the search engine knows to return the car and not the animal

9. Web Time Axis • Allows for a search constrained by date • Specific time period instead of searching for specific dates. • You could ask the search engine • “Show me all results for my query from a specific time period” • “Tell me what were the most popular results for ‘George W. Bush’ on May 3, 2004”

10. The End!!