We earlier reported about how search engine company Powerset was working on a search engine that can understand the content of the web and that you would be able to ask it questions, instead of searching with keywords. A team of scientists at Wright State University, lead by Dr. Amit Sheth, will now start an almost identical project. The mission is to create a technology that can understand, interpret and use the information available on the web. The goals and the advantages are many and they hope to make the lives easier for many; including scientists, doctors, analysts, security experts and the military, to mention a few. The greatest advantage with such a product is that it can analyze and find similarities between things that are described in different ways, or with different terms;
Doctors can easily check if two different medicines would interact and through that minimize the number of mistreatments because of poorly mixed medications. It would also be easier to analyze symptoms and reach a diagnosis. In research it could be used to find patterns and similar properties of molecules, or within communities and environments.
Analysts could use it to find patterns in trends by processing a load of variables (various market information, historical facts, etc.) and announce more precise predictions. To security experts and the military it could be about interpreting sensor data and matching criminal profiles in ways that wasn’t possible possible.
At the end, we have to say that a semantic web is looking very interesting and could open up a whole bunch of new possibilities. Dr. Seth will lead this project at Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University and some more information about project is available at its website.
