TAP

1
TAP

• R.V.Guha, IBM Research
• Rob McCool, Stanford KSL

2
TAP Context

• Islands of XML from disparate web services
• Example Tori Amos
• Up to consumer to put these chunks together
• Situation analogous to pre-web hypertext systems
  and RDBMS today

3
TAP Goal

• Create a coherent semantic web from disparate
  chunks
• Effectively make the web a giant distributed DB
• Why --- Bringing the Internet to programs

4
TAP What We Do

• Inspired by DNS and early web --- simple
  contracts, everything decentralized
• Protocols to publish navigate
• a small simple set of publishing access
  guidelines that knit together schematically
  unified whole create
• Bootstrapping Create comprehensive chunks of the
  semantic web in a few areas
• Applications Semantic Search, Internet Wet Lab

5
TAP Protocol GetData

• Simple API to navigate this web
• DNS GetHostByName(lthostgt) gt ip addr.
• TAP GetData(ltresourcegt, ltpropertygt) gt value
• GetData(ltTori Amosgt, birthplace) gt ltNewton, NCgt
• GetData(ltNewton, NCgt, temperature) gt 57 F
• GetData(ltNewton, NCgt, locatedIn) gt ltNorth
  Carolinagt
• Publisher exposes data as a graph via GetData
• Consumer uses GetData to navigate graph
• Key tech. issues Caching, Directories, Names

6
The Name Problem

• We dont get nice sub-graphs
• like these, with easy to use
• assembly instructions

North Carolina
USA
Located in
Located in
Geo Almanac
City
instanceof
Weather channel
Newton, NC
temperature
Newton, NC
62 F
Newton, NC
CDNow
birthplace

Tori Amos
Under The Pink
Atlantic
Musician
publisher
Author
instanceof
Tori Amos
Author
instanceof
Date Of Birth
instanceof
publisher
People Magazine
8/22/63
Crucify
Music Album
EMI
7
We get a mess like this
USA
North Carolina
Located in
Located in
Geo Almanac
City
instanceof

USNC0491
Weather channel
NTNC
temperature
62 F
Newton,_NorthCar
CDNow
birthplace

328723677
Under The Pink
Atlantic
Musician
publisher
Author
instanceof
0,9855,109071,00
Author
instanceof
Date Of Birth
instanceof
publisher
8/22/63
Crucify
Music Album
EMI
People Magazine
8
The Name Problem

• Names are crucial in information exchange
• 2 parties cannot exchange information about an
  object without agreeing on how they are going to
  refer to it
• The Problem too many names to keep track off!
• No URN for ltNewton, NCgt or ltTori Amosgt
• Different sites have different names for the same
  thing!
• URN efforts to date largely failures
• Traditional Approach Name-Mapping tables

9

USA
North Carolina
USNC0491
Weather channel
Located in
temperature
62 F
Located in
Geo Almanac
City
instanceof
USNC0491

NTNC
NTNC
Calling program
328723677 lt-gt 0,9855,1 USNC0491 lt-gt NTNC lt-gt
. . .
Newton,_NorthCar
Newton,_Nor 0,9855,
328723677
birthplace

328723677
Under The Pink
Atlantic
Musician
publisher
Author
instanceof
0,9855,109071,00
Author
instanceof
Date Of Birth
instanceof
publisher
8/22/63
Crucify
Music Album
EMI
People Magazine
CDNow
10
TAP Naming

• Reference by descriptions
• E.g., A Musician whose firstName is Tori and
  whose lastName is Amos and whose
• Names are degenerate descriptions
• AmznB000002UB2, CDNOW 328723677
• Description based name negotiation
• Core Insight
• Dont require globally unique names for
  everything if we can describe things using a
  starting vocabulary
• Need a description language, starting vocabulary
  and negotiation mechanism
• Bootstrapping some shared meaning into more
  shared meaning

11
The vision descriptions choreograph the
integration
North Carolina
USA
Located in
Weather channel
Geo Almanac
temperature
Located in
62 F
City
USNC0491

D1
instanceof
NTNC
D1
Calling program
D1 description of Newton, NC D2 description
of Tori Amos
Newton,_NorthCar
D1, D2
CDNow
D2
birthplace

Under The Pink
Atlantic
0,9855,109071,00
Musician
publisher
Author
328723677
instanceof
Author
instanceof
Date Of Birth
instanceof
publisher
8/22/63
Crucify
Music Album
EMI
People Magazine
12
Description based References

• The core protocol GetData
• GetData(Resource Description, arc-label)
• GetData(ltTori Amosgt, birthplace)
• GetData(RDF Description of Tori Amos, birthplace)
• A form of loose coupling
• Handling Ambiguity, Failure to denote,
• The core contract
• Expose your data as a Graph
• Map incoming descriptions to nodes in your graph
• In return, your data is now integrated into the
  global semantic web

13
Infrastructure Kernel Vocabulary

• Provides vocabulary for descriptions
• Purpose is to provide the infrastructure for
  constructing descriptions with which programs can
  refer to things
• A Musician whose firstName is Tori and whose
  lastName is Amos and whose
• It doesnt reside anywhere its a specification

14
Applications

• Good infrastructures have waves of applications
• WWW home pages, portals, ecommerce,
• DNS email, telnet, ftp, gopher, WWW
• Semantic Search
• Adding Semantics to Search
• Crawl, grab, index model of search doesnt work
  for dynamic web sites or web applications
• Semantic based Search Augmentation enables search
  to cover time sensitive data
• Internet Wet Lab

15
Semantic Web Application Semantic Search

16
Search Augmentation Example

17
How the Semantic Infrastructure gets
used in Semantic Search

KB
UDDI
Musician whose genre is ClassicalMusic, First
name is
Who has - concert dates? - discography? -
auctions? - bio? For musician whose
Search Front End
Yo Yo Ma
Caching Buffering
Concert Dates for Musician whose
Auctions for
Bio for
Discography for
AllMusic
TicketMaster
EBay
CDNow
18
TAP KBs for Semantic Search

• Large Knowledge Base of specific musicians,
  cities, athletes,
• Currently covers about 20 of search terms
• Built in a largely automated fashion
• Scrapers for free data sources
• Simple noun phrase analysis of news articles
• AP, Reuters,
• Scrapers for important sites to bootstrap
• KB also helps bootstrap the semantic web

19
KB Coverage Today

• Music
• Musicians, instr., styles
• Movies
• Movies, actors, tv-shows
• Authors
• Top authors, classic books,
• Sports
• Athletes, sports, sports teams, equipment
• Autos
• Auto models, motorcycles, .
• Companies
• Fortune 500

• Home Appliances
• Types, brands
• Toys
• Types, brands
• Baby products
• Types, brands
• Places
• Countries, cities, tourist attractions,
• Consumer electronics
• Audio/Video, Communication
• Game consoles, titles,
• Health
• Diseases, Drugs,

20
Semantic Site Search

• Semantic Search useful not just for internet wide
  search, but also for site search
• Same principles as internet-wide search
• KBs created for searching related individual
  sites can be shared between sites
• These KBs feed into global semantic web
• Example Semantic Search for www.w3.org

21
TAP Appl Internet Wet Lab

• In many sciences, more data will be produced in
  the next 2 years than exists today
• Increasingly, research consists of writing
  programs that mine this data
• Data is isolated as islands in different labs
• Data from one lab not easily available to
  programs in another lab
• We want to use TAP to create a single virtual
  net-wide database containing all this
  experimental data
• Example Clinical Trial Data

22
TAP Organization

• TAP is a multi-organization research effort
• IBM, Stanford KSL, Stanford Logic Group, CMU
  West,
• KBs, source-code, etc. freely available (via BSD
  license)
• A number of new projects starting up places,
  entertainment,
• We invite you to join
• URL http//tap.stanford.edu/

23
TAP Summary

• Small set of guidelines that create a coherent
  semantic web out of disparate web services
• Potential solution to naming problem
• Relevant to all web services
• Semantics Search Internet Wet Lab as driving
  applications
• TAP is a research project
• Lot of fundamental work remains to be done
• Everything freely available. We want you to join!

24
Questions
25
US State
USA
instanceof
City
Country
Geo Almanac
CDNow
North Carolina
Located in
People Magazine

instanceof
instanceof
Located in
Weather channel
temperature
62 F
Bg KB
Newton, NC
birthplace
Under The Pink
Tori Amos
Atlantic
Author
publisher
instanceof
Musician
Date Of Birth
Author
instanceof
Crucify
publisher
Music Album
8/22/63
EMI

instanceof
26

USA
North Carolina
Located in
Located in
Newton, NC

Weather channel
Geo Almanac
temperature
City
62 F
instanceof
Newton, NC
Newton, NC
CDNow
birthplace

Tori Amos
Under The Pink
Atlantic
Musician
publisher
Author
instanceof
Tori Amos
Author
instanceof
Date Of Birth
instanceof
publisher
People Magazine
8/22/63
Crucify
Music Album
EMI
27
TAP Summary

• Focus is shifting from just storing and
  retrieving data to exchanging data. XML provides
  syntax. We need semantics
• We need infrastructure layer for semantics
• Applications drive infrastructures. The driving
  application for this layer is Semantics based
  Search News Augmentation.

28
What is an Internet Infrastructure Layer?

• There is a data structure, pieces of which are in
  different places on the net
• DNS Hash table of host names to ip addresses
  accessed via GetHostByName
• WWW Directed graph of documents accessed via
  HTTP GET/POST
• Infrastructure layer provides a set of standards
  APIs to unify the different pieces so that a
  client can pretend it is all local

29
Application 2 RTA for news articles

30
RTA for News Articles
Knowledge Base
Text analysis
Directory
SportsTeam_TexasRangers, AthleteRodriguez_Alex
Whose - team schedule? - posters? -
auctions? - bio?
Search/ Syndication Front End
News article
Team Schedule for team whose title
Auctions for
Poster for
Videos for
AllPosters
MLB.com
EBay
AOL Shopping