1 Southhampton, 1/03 1 Part 4: Mindswap tools Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory Semantic Web Agents Project

1Southhampton, 1/03 1 www.mindswap.org

Part 4: Mindswap tools

Maryland Information and Network Dynamics LaboratorySemantic Web Agents Project

http://www.mindswap.org/

2Southhampton, 1/03 2 www.mindswap.org

Adding power via Semantic Web

Tools can be domain independent Your tool should be usable in lots of contexts! Use the standards:

OWL and its successors crucial

Tools should assume multiple ontologies “It’s the links, stupid”

Ontology search, collection, “integration” crucial Check out the DAML crawler (http://www.daml.org/crawler)

BackEnd technologies must be scaleable Can co-evolve with Semantic Web size

But remember, the Web is HUGE

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Semantic Web Knowledge Acquisition

Virtually no one will create ontologies from scratch High-End ontology developers will be a tiny percentage

(10,000 High end Web Designers = 1/10,000 of users) It is easier to read then to create ontologies Expect “cut and paste” (HTML analogy)

Most used OWL editor to date is Emacs Can Bootstrap from existing content

HTML screen scrapers, structured data, Excel spread sheets,… No training allowed

Motivated users will skim the docs on occasion Most users want to use it now “Everyone” has a browser - deploy tools through that

Common metaphors must be used: Form fill, menu, search

Note: No formal justification for any of these - but it worked before!

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GIVE IT AWAY!!!!!

There is, and will be, no market for any of this unless we create it!

No one will make money selling their tools until we have MANY more users

Make small, cheap, easy to download version of your tools available

Give it away The big winners on the web made it available for free:

Browsers: Mosaic, Netscape, IE Plug-ins: Flash, RealPlayer, Quicktime Tools: Adobe, Real Media

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RIC: Allow extensibility

Users MUST be able to add their own concepts Semantic Web (and OWL) allow this

Advanced users will become ontology providers It will be “cool” to have yours be the ontology of choice in a domain

Consistency CANNOT be maintained on the web May be a useful heuristic Insist on consistency and the Semantic Web fails!

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Smore: Making Markup Easier

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Common Metaphor across tools

Photo SMORE Mail SMORE

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Web “travel agents”

Query processed: 73 answers found Google document search finds 235,312 possible page hits. Http://www…/CowTexas.html claims the answer is 289,921,836

A database entitled “Texas Cattle Association” can be queried for the answer, but you will need “authorization as a state employee.”

A computer program that can compute that number is offered by the State of Texas Cattleman’s Cooperative, click here to run program.

... The “sex network” can answer anything that troubles you, click here for

relief... The “UFO network” claims the “all cows in Texas have been replaced by

aliens

How many cows are there in Texas?

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Web Agents need Service Descriptions

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Grounding in DAML-S

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Reasoner-based composer

Advanced information management capabilities Discovery, Filtering, Composition

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Putting all this together…

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…Provides a beginning

document

service

database

Are there any mountains in Europe bigger than Mt. Blanc?

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Distributed trust relationships

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TrustMail