BBC and IBM open the door to the Semantic Web
Yesterday, the Guardian reported this:
The BBC has struck a partnership deal with IBM to develop “web 3.0″ technology, starting with a video search system for CBeebies and CBBC programmes, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
…The idea is that the system being developed with IBM, called Marvel, will deliver a mass of relevant images and videos when content is searched.
What’s this? Intelligent search of images? We all know that a computer can’t tell the difference between a picture of a dog and a picture of a rabbit.
Not true, claims IBM, which first announced the Marvel technology in late 2004. CNET described how the image search works:
Marvel largely relies on a technology called support vector machines, pioneered by Vladimir Vapnik at AT&T about a decade ago. In this type of artificial intelligence, a computer learns to assign the equivalent of a yes or no value to a piece of data. In other words, If the computer is supposed to distinguish between an indoor or outdoor scene, trees in a shot could well prompt the computer to put the clip in the outdoor bucket.
Do we believe them? It’s early days yet, but there are lots of people heading in that direction. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is using humans to accomplish tasks like distinguishing outside trees from trees in pots.
This is what we’re after, what the Semantic Web is about. Intelligence. Search that understands you. Search that thinks the way you think. After all, the only way the utility of available information can even approximate keeping up with its growth is by making it more and more efficient to access the stuff you really need.
That’s where MyWebDNA comes in, too: same direction, different approach. It overlays a mathematical profile of your core values on a Google search page to circle the two results most relevant to you. Because the technology behind it is a universal measure of relevance, it could be developed to integrate with video search as well. Greater ability to categorize items + personalization = Semantic Web.
That, my friends, is where we’re headed. That’s the future of the Internet: responsive, intelligent, connected. Make no mistake, it will happen, and, when it does, we’ll all wonder how we ever survived without it.
