So this seems to be about superimposing the relational model on ad-hoc data? It seems like an idea that has been explored ad infinitum. It also seems like it's for want of a use case, in its current form.<p>Like they say in the article, the main issue they'll run in to is that people really don't want to build taxonomies manually. My skeptic prediction: Unless they get some really snappy text mining to go with the product, it'll be dead in the water. When you want to ad-hoc mine certain data sets, it's usually because you've just figured out you need some specific query answered. Having to spend several hours structuring the data before you run the actual query seems about as laborious as just doing the original work yourself. Though I might be of limited vision, or just missing something fundamental here.
Seems like they're stuck on the same problems that have always killed the Semantic Web: manual metadata, and incompatible schemas. Without a solution to either, this is no different from what we had in 2003.
not to be confused with Amazon Silk[1], which is the browser offloading to AWS for kindles.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk</a>
To recap, 'semantics' is the study of meaning. Humans derive meaning from linguistic symbols by comparing them to their prior experiences. The basic question being "Has this symbol, or a closely associated symbol, been present in the context of a memory I have?" If it is, then we 'understand' the symbol by pulling up the memory or memories tied to it. For most symbols (e.g. apple) there is a rich personal history or experiences we can compare it to.<p>So the mapping here is symbol -> experiences, where experiences are the memories of senses over time.<p>Thus the data structure that will ultimately <i>solve</i> this problem is one that performs <i>that</i> mapping, not one which maps symbols to a necessarily arbitrary and limited other set of symbols (aka category labels and facts).
Not to be confused with Jason Rohrer's silk, which is an actually creative solution to a much more core problem, is open-source, and not driven by venture-capital segway hypewaves: <a href="http://hypertext.sourceforge.net/silk/" rel="nofollow">http://hypertext.sourceforge.net/silk/</a>
They should have a tutorial that walks me through how to accomplish example project in the promo video. From what I can tell I would have to import all those prime minister pages from Wikipedia manually?<p>PS. I'm very interested in the ideas behind the semantic web, and the video hints that Silk may have gotten closer than anyone else at successfully "building the human" into the software design. IMO it's all about removing friction and I see some promising ideas in that regard, so congrats to Silk for that!
This sounds exactly like DEVONthink, reframed as "semantic web":<p><a href="http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overvie...</a>
It is not clear if this is really a Semantic Web app<p>1. Does it allow OWL/RDF import/exports? Can I bring in my "linked data" schemas into Silk?<p>2. Is there any ontology reasoning support in search?