- Example of the Biblical story
- Curse of the languages – that people could no longer cooperate
- Three lessons
- Don’t mess with God
- Cooperation
- How do we identify that apples are apples and oranges are oranges?
- We put our experiences together in order to distinguish the two things
- Context
- The “database of things” around our experiences
- What happens when we don’t agree?
- We crash Martian orbiters
- What about a computer?
- When a computer encounters a piece of data, it has no context
- Is the number 20 an hour, a number, the result of an algorithm?
- Can’t computers use HTML as a sort of a database to provide context for all the things they look at?
- No; HTML was designed for humans to understand; not for computers
- People understand relationships between data; computers don’t unless we tell them
- How do we get computers to understand and give them context?
- How do you explain the semantic web and semantic technologies?
- Tagging important data with a context and a vocabulary
- Humans frequently don’t speak the same language at all
- We have different preconceptions and different filters
- We have to build ontologies, vocabularies, and tag everything and connect it to the semantic database so computers can understand it
- If you are running predictive analysis on a whole bunch of data, you can use semantic analysis to unify datasets from very distant places and use it to understand what’s predictive
- Potential application: healthcare and science
- Semantic data makes the data highly valuable, because it allows other groups to “piggyback” on work that is being done without needing a “translation” of the work
- Any company can define their own ontology, but if we let a company control them, it becomes hard to use them
- Publishing and Web apps
- What if we started tagging news semantically so a computer can understand the relationships?
- Starts with making pure browsing, search, and discovery better
- MS Pivot as an example of data that is semantically tagged
- Public health
- What if we semantically tagged symptoms for everything across the country?
- Could identify the patterns related to disease and illness outbreak
- AI
- Semantics is the foundation for very robust AI
- This is why computers can’t respond to stimuli the same way we do
- Example – have people watch something and take semantic data of the emotional response – use those curves to model relationship in a computer
- Companies using – Merck, Biogen Idec, GroupM, Chevron
- Projects
- DBPedia – structured data from Wikipedia
- GoodRelations – product information, etc.
- Swoogle – semantic resource search engine
- Cambridge Semantics – enabled spreadsheets used by Group M
- Pivot
- What does this all add up to?
- A better understanding of our world and the patterns that drive it
- Accelerated convergence of industries
- Accelerated innovation and discovery
