It is amazing how it works! Zipf discovered “The principle of Least Effort” which states that people will work to minimize the amount of work they do! Not only for the current status, but also taken under consideration the future work too! In Language Zipf found that there is relation between the the frequency of word f and its position in the list, known as rank r.

f . r = k

Mondelbrot argued against him saying: “lorsque Zipf essayait de represented tout par cette loi, il essayait d’habiller tout le mode avec des vetements d’une seule taille”.

However,  Zipf’s laws apply on many different linguistic models, from the meaning of words, to even the human sexuality… His book Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort is a book every linguistic have to own!

I attended the IEEE Summer School on Semantic Computing in Berkeley University last week. It was interesting to see that all the participants were from Europe, non-US citizen! Quite surprising!!!

It seems to me I am meeting the same participants and organizers over-and-over again whenever I go to a semantic event! Somehow this makes me feel that there is kind of persistance among us to be part of each important event, but also means that the initiative community still the same.

This Blog will concentrate mainly on the Semantic Web and more specifically on the application of Semantic Web in E-learning Domain.

The topics will branch into different categories, such as Web mining, Text mining, Ontologies, Information Retrieval, Search Engines, Natural Language Processing, etc.

Semantics has to do with understanding the nature of the meaning. The question is what is the relation between the web and semantics? Why do we need to move to Semantic Web?

The current Web with its exponential growth and openness to whole community covers almost every area of our living. This huge amount of data on the Web is, somehow,  interconnected. But the way the Web was first designed did not allow to have a dynamic interconnection between the data. When Tim-Berners Lee invented the Web in 1989-1990, he wanted to have a place where people can post and  share  information. As starting point, he wanted to have an infrastructure that is so simple that anyone can collaborate and be part of this new universe. Of course, he succeeded to have a simple schema to mange the information, relying on TCP/IP protocols and having the URL as a medium to link things. Also the simplicity of having an HTML schema allowed inexpert programmer to be a programmer, from the Web prospective. All this served the generation of two decades of the usage of the Web: Web 1.0: 1990-1999 and Web 2.0: 1999-2009.

A major problem in the current Web is that information is static, that means if you have a duplicate of the same information in different locations on the Web, updating one does not automatically update the other. Some Websites started to change the way information presented on the Web by using Databases to present this  information, that helped in providing an easy way to update your current information, a solution from the presentation side of the data, but it did not help in the distribution side of the same data. Therefore, the Semantic Web came as an idea to apply a solution on the Web as a whole.