Earl grey, hot!
Everybody has a different notion of what constitutes semantic search. The initial paper coining the term “semantic search” from Guha et al. describes a system that shows objects alongside document search results in a web search engine.
Recently, especially natural language processing outfits have hijacked the term: all of a sudden their 20+ year old research is “semantic”. Their great promise (which is also Powerset’s) is to have a computer answer your questions posed in natural language faster than you can say “whizbang”.
I think computers answering natural language questions is science fiction, and creates expectations that are impossible to fulfill, for now and the years to come. Just because it’ll be nice to have a system means that it’s possible to build. Sure, I’d like to tell the computer to replicate a hot beverage for my enjoyment. Does that mean scientists and engineers are able to build that system? Not in your lifetime, I’m afraid.
For now, the best one can do is matching keywords on an object graph, plus computing clever rankings and maybe point-and-click query refinement. It’ll be a while until the computer tells you the right answer to “what’s the meaning of life?”. Don’t hold your breath.
September 22nd, 2008 at 16:39
so what happened to the holy scenario that timbl mentioned in a scientific american journal? I remember part of it: a girl wants to book an appointment for a GP for her mother and she ….
I guess it was a nice sci-fi scenario directed by timbl, and you want to base your number (see your early post) on him!!!
September 23rd, 2008 at 03:48
“what’s the meaning of life?”
42 (easy as pie…)