Nearly there

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.

It looks like everybody and their dog is writing faceted browsers these days.

Benjamin Nowack announced one a few days ago on the crunchbase mailing list, and David Huynh announced a “novel” way of browsing graph structured data based on sets on the swig mailing list.

Good that Michiel Hildebrand noted that set-based browsing existed before, in /facet and Eyal Oren’s work. Our own SWSE system, in fact, had set-based focus change in its first incarnation more than a year ago.

We removed that functionality for the current SWSE interface, because users didn’t seem to get what’s going on. But it looks like there’s some new design ideas to build an interaction model that is intuitive. Or we just have to be more picky about our users…