In Response to: This is Not the Future (Update #3)

Kingsley Uyi Idehen

kidehen@openlinksw.com — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:32:48 GMT

glenn mcdonald wrote:
<<<
I'm not complaining about "aesthetics", nor even exactly about UI. You're trying to make the case that this new technology (both semantic web technology in general, and Virtuoso's in particular) can provide a better searching/finding experience. (Which is something I also believe.) But the experience of using this demo is bad. You say its drawbacks are irrelevant to what you're trying to show. But the irrelevance is in the way, and I think the problems with this demo swamp out the technical virtues. And since bad demos kind of diminish everything by association, I think you reinforce the prevalent impression that "this stuff" is esoteric gibberish.

So my challenge? Do a demo that picks some coherent, explainable thing, and is clearly and unambiguously good at that, without requiring caveats and partial apologies.
>>

Glenn,

The reason for the disclaimer is because on the "Web" I can make a web page on viewable by a user agent of type: Programmer, for instance. This demo was all about Entity-Attribute-Value (of Subject-Predicate-Object) based navigation of entity graphs when the corpus is large with the scale-free realities of the Web in play.

The goal was to show a Web Service that can alleviate higher level developers of the grunt work associated with the low-level DBMS engine stuff.

That said, I also agree with "esoteric" concern perspective that bare-bones UI demos inadvertently perpetuate :-) Thus, we will continue to improve the basic UI of this service, and get more supporting collateral out the door.

Thus, do we have a deal? Also, I am all ears re. any UI enhancements you would like to see.

Happy New Year!

Kingsley

glenn mcdonald

gmcdonald@furia.com — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:25:17 GMT

I'm not complaining about "aesthetics", nor even exactly about UI. You're trying to make the case that this new technology (both semantic web technology in general, and Virtuoso's in particular) can provide a better searching/finding experience. (Which is something I also believe.) But the experience of using this demo is bad. You say its drawbacks are irrelevant to what you're trying to show. But the irrelevance is in the way, and I think the problems with this demo swamp out the technical virtues. And since bad demos kind of diminish everything by association, I think you reinforce the prevalent impression that "this stuff" is esoteric gibberish.

So my challenge? Do a demo that picks some coherent, explainable thing, and is clearly and unambiguously good at that, without requiring caveats and partial apologies.

Re: In Response to: This is Not the Future

Kingsley Uyi Idehen (kidehen@openlinksw.com) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:20:51 GMT

Matthias, Thanks for your comments. The ideal solution comes down to combining the best of Document oriented full text search and structured Linked Data queries (driven by entity types and property filtering). Virtuoso possesses an in-built full text search engine, and we can tweak both the demo core and its UI to also unveil this aspect of Virtuoso in more depth via a page rank demo. Of course, we can also play well with Google and Yahoo (via job delegation). The only issue right now is time, we never set out to demonstrate page rank, this demo is all about structured querying :-) Kingsley

Matthias Samwald

samwald@gmx.at — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:48:09 GMT

The comments about the user interface in this blog are indeed quite improper.
However, the point being made about the importance of ranking based on relevance is very important, and has indeed not been properly addressed in Semantic Web / LOD developments so far.