Matters

Year 2004 News Archive: November: "November 1, 2004: Sony lab tips 'emergent semantics' to make sense of Web. By Junko and Yoshida R. Colin Johnson. EE Times. 'Sony Computer Science Laboratory is positioning its 'emergent semantics' as a self-organizing alternative to the W3C's Semantic Web that does not require any recoding of the data currently available online. Based on successful experiments with communities of robots, emergent-semantic technology is built on the principles of human learning, representatives of the Sony lab said at an open house here last month. Much as these communities of 'agents' extract meaning (semantics) from the character of their interactions, emergent semantics extracts the meaning of Web documents from the manner in which people use them, the researchers said. Based on just-patented emergent-semantics principles for its robots, the Sony scheme harnesses the human communication and social interaction among peer-to-peer file sharers, database searchers and content creators to append the semantic dimension to the Web automatically, instead of depending on the owner of each piece of data to tag it. The latter methodology forms the basis of W3C's Semantic Web. Conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web uses extended markup language to assign 'meaning' to elements of Web pages. A dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) are dutifully spinning out specs for database coding. At its open house, Sony argued that this is similar to attempting artificial intelligence by writing if-then statements about everything in the world -- the bane of traditional AI. ... In emergent semantics, a user's agent bootstraps the information and categorization of content, such as the classification of music in genres. Through interactions among agents trading 'favorite' sosongs, genres emerge that are common to sets of users. Such emergent semantics as self-organizing genres are automatically tagged onto the content as an extra layer of information rather than depending on people to do the tagging, [Peter] Hanappe said."
>>> Web-Searching Agents, Ontologies, Representation, Agents, Information Retrieval"