I have a request!
Does anyone out there know if it’s possible to capture the bounds of a subject domain, out there on the inter-tubes I mean. For example, if a surveyor came to my house, he could describe it pretty succinctly and appropriately comprehensively but if I do a search on blood coagulation measurement – I get nothing of the kind. “Coagulation measurement devices“… I get 436,000 articles from uncle Google but not a “Read these articles and you have it covered”, not “here are the dimensions/vectors of the subject.. click on these and you’ll have it covered”. Can it be so hard?
With semantic web technologies, ontologies and knowledge bases – can it be so hard to use services like Twine, True Knowledge etc etc to build subject maps.
You could even take me on a tour of the web, showing me where to click and learn! Or if I click on a “Hitler’s a nice chap” article.. perhaps you could show me that “counter view points” exist. Well show them to me!
Shouldn’t creationist articles be a widget-click away from Darwinist articles etc etc.. this seems a rich theme. Anyone wanna discuss…. there’s tech in here, there’s value, interesting UI’s etc. anyone start something in this field?
I also find this an extremely interesting area, but unfortunately also a very difficult one as it goes deep into the heart of AI. It is even tricky to nail down what “a topic” is, and how it can have sub-topics, super-topics, contrasting topics, cross-domain linked topics, and topics which are related to some degree or other. I have discussed similar ideas with a number of people, and have written a research proposal for a slightly more manageable problem: analysing the relationships between people and topics. People are well-defined entities, making them easier to analyse; topics and subjects attach themselves naturally to people (interests) and their interactions with other people (conferences, citations, joint publications, discussions etc. on a particular topic). And if you can find out who the key opinion leaders are in a field, and also the rebellious outsiders, you can just go and talk to them directly (that’s the “it doesn’t matter how little I know, as long as I know someone who does know” approach).
A workable solution of this problem would probably try to extract facts from natural language text using computational linguistics and machine learning (e.g. recognising phrases like “in contrast to Y, X is A while Y is B and C). Anything learnt this way will of course be probabilistic/bayesian, not definite. This can be augmented with information from the semantic web, but I don’t think it’s possible yet to rely solely on manually-built semantic data sources such as ontologies as they are still quite limited.
I am planning to work on this under the umbrella of a PhD with the natural language processing people at the Cambridge Computer Lab, in collaboration with Zoubin in Engineering. I think this would be the right environment to learn the state-of-the-art techniques and to start building a prototype, which could then be spun out into a business when the time is right.
Happy to discuss!
very cool… lets chat for sure. Prof Zoubin had some “this is most similar to that” or “if this is the sub set… then this is the super-set” algorythms and so I wonder if this is adjacent to the solution set we need. It strikes me that Twine is a cluster of people who define knowledge spaces semantically… could this be used as a primer.
I’ll buy you a coffee..
You want an introduction to a topic? Kosmix is the daddy of this stuff.
Dunno what content you *expect* but Kosmix generated this: http://www.kosmix.com/topic/Coagulation_measurement_devices?
Kosmix utilizes semantic technologies to generate subject maps. It’s a one stop shop for aggregated knowledge. Like Mahalo, but not dumb (Mahalo is edited by humans)
“With semantic web technologies, ontologies and knowledge bases – can it be so hard to use services like Twine, True Knowledge etc etc to build subject maps.”
True Knowledge is focussed on giving straight answers to direct questions, so the whole ontology is geared towards understanding exactly what you asked and giving you an exact answer.
Having said that, it would be possible to build subject maps out of the True Knowledge ontology if there was someone who wanted to use them.
Interesting – and crossed a discussion had yesterday needing a similar solution – as a 2 year old thread it’s a bit of a shame you haven’t revisted the topic to indicate if you have made any progress in finding any pointers or solutions.