[MOBY-l] Fwd: Problems searching with semantic moby

[Frank Gibbons]

Gary,

At 07:25 PM 8/24/2004, you wrote:
>However, RDF/XML is very unwieldy for non-geek users. Hence, one of the 
>goals of Semantic MOBY was to have a "Google-like" interface for discovery 
>and engagement Semantic MOBY service providers. That is what you see at 
>the www.semanticmoby.org home page. In a sense, it's the Semantic 
>equivalent of the MOBY Central 'gbrowse' front end 
>(http://mobycentral.cbr.nrc.ca/cgi-bin/gbrowse_moby) and the very immature 
>beginning of a "Semantic Google".

Thanks for that detailed response. Query composition seems like the biggest 
hurdle to using 'smoogle' (Semantic-Moby Google), and your 
provider/subject/object interface certainly seems like a sensible first 
step towards simplifying it. On a broader level, what do you know about how 
other semantic web groups are approaching this problem?

Another question/suggestion: are there any toy services out there, that I 
could play with? What are some of the providers? I'm thinking back to the 
first days of Mosaic, before there were any search engines. You'd fire up 
Mosaic, and it would load a page from NCSA listing all the new websites for 
that day, with a little textual description. (It's astonishing to think 
that this was ever possible!) I guess Ken Steube's scripts do something 
similar, albeit dynamically, providing a list of all available MOBY-S 
services. Given the world's general unfamiliarity with semantic web 
concepts, I wonder if it wouldn't help to list a few of the available 
S-MOBY services, just to get people playing. Right now, I don't know where 
to look for services.

One last thing: I tried using the search interface again, I'm still getting 
the error about '/keyword-search not found'.

This is exciting stuff, I'm looking forward to seeing the updated page 
you're working on now!

-F

PhD, Computational Biologist,
Harvard Medical School BCMP/SGM-322, 250 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115, USA.
Tel: 617-432-3555       Fax: 
617-432-3557       http://llama.med.harvard.edu/~fgibbons