Elsevier published our work on Semantic Web Services with Lightweight Descriptions of Services in its Advances in Computers, volume 76 (co-authored by me, Jacek Kopecky, Jana Viskova, Adrian Mocan, Mick Kerrigan and Dieter Fensel). In order to publish in this book, authors need to receive an invitation from Elsevier and we were glad to receive this invitation in 2008. This book’s edition is in general about semantic web, its foundations and applications such as social web.

It is nice to see that apart from our contribution, there is also a chapter from my former collegues from DERI Galway, John Breslin et al., on The Future of Social Websites: Sharing Data and Trusted Applications with Semantics.

Google’s VP research, Alfred Spector, reveals plans on exploiting the huge amount of data for building a “database of concepts and relationships between them” for better search results. He envisions that Google should be able to learn such information from interactions and a very large of information, a different approach to a traditional AI where such an ontology is usually imposed to a system and controlled by an expert.

The use of such ontology is then quite obvious:

Let’s imagine our search software is responding to a query on pets, but we find articles on dogs and cats, but without the word pets. This database of relationships would let Google know that the article is probably about pets because there are multiple instances of a subcategory of “pet.” The database would enable much better search and better language translation because there’d be a better understanding of the meaning of the words.

From this interview it is clear that Google recognizes the importance of semantics for search, however, the major challenge is in construction of ontologies describing a huge and a dynamic environment on which such intelligent search would reliably operate.