Re: [Myexperiment-discuss] Google maps/mashups article

[Leslie Carr]

Excuse me for coming out of lurking mode.

I wonder if I can win people to the point of view that a semantic  
mashup isn't a mashup at all even if it looks like one and it  
apparently achieves the same thing.

Why did the word 'mash' come to be used in this context? Obviously it  
is because of a culinary analogy. What is mashing? It is breaking  
down an object so that its boundaries are no longer preserved (think  
mashed potatoes, obviously). My point is that the process of  
"mashing" is a process of decomposition, of extracting data from  
pages or portals or silos and reinterpreting it in an intermediate  
state that can be built up again into a new "mashed up" application.  
If that process of deconstruction (in the article mentioned below it  
was data mining street addresses from web pages) is not necessary,  
then what we have is the application of a function to some data. Just  
an 'up' without the 'mash'. In that sense, semantic mashups should be  
a lot easier - in fact there shouldn't be any mashing going on, only  
'construction' or 'application'. So, semantic mashups use 'premashed  
data' (see  http://www.web2journal.com/read/361294.htm),  but  
'premashed data' is just 'data' and a mashup just becomes an  
application.

Mashups are only impressive because it has been so difficult to do  
the mashing - having watched the development of the AKT system that  
won the 2003 Semantic Web Challenge [http:// 
challenge.semanticweb.org/], then I know that the challenge was to  
get hold of the data (people, projects, funding, places,  
publications). That took a LOT of sweat and a LOT of data mining.

So perhaps the semantic web should both make mashups easier and  
render the concept out of date? Am I right, wrong or simply making a  
null point? I'd like to know so that I can change the slides in my  
current set of talks!
--
Les Carr

On 16 Jul 2007, at 21:12, Carole Goble wrote:

> Antoon
>
> semantic mashups, ie smash-ups
>
> Carole
>
> > http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff_maps?currentPage=1
> >
> > "The annotations weren't created by Google, nor by some official  
> > mapping
> > agency. Instead, they are the products of a volunteer army of amateur
> > cartographers. "It didn't take sophisticated software," Hanke  
> > says. "What it
> > took was a substrate - the satellite imagery of Earth - in an  
> > accessible
> > form and a simple authoring language for people to create and  
> > share stuff.
> > Once that software existed, the urge to describe and annotate just  
> > took
> > off."
> > "Today, the number of mashed-up Google Maps exceeds 50,000."
> >
> > "Once you express location in human terms, you get multiple places  
> > with the
> > same name, or political issues over where boundaries are, or local
> > differences," says David Weinberger. "As soon as you leave the  
> > latitude/
> > longitude substrate, you get lost in the ambiguous jumble of  
> > meaning. It's
> > as close to Babel as we get."
> > "In the midst of all this cacophony, Google is discovering that a  
> > smart,
> > effective search engine is once again the key."
> >
> > +1 for the last comment :-)
> >
> > Antoon
> >
> >
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>
>
>
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