Semantic Search Is A Serious
Game
Following
my prior posts Serious Games, Serious Money: Google's Web Reshaping, and Google+ Turns Spheres of Connections Into Serious Games, Google
Knowledge Graph is the latest piece in the giant puzzle Google is
trying to put together in reshaping the Web.
Google
launched Knowledge Graph in May 2012, announcing the feature as “a
critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps
into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit
more like people do”.
As
described by Google, the Knowledge Graph collects information about real
world objects --objects being a person, a book, a movie and many other items.
By understanding the relationships between those objects, Google can do a
better job in understanding what exactly we are searching for or even predict
our next questions before we consider them, thus adding educational value to what
we originally wanted.
Google aspires
to go far beyond providing information based on keywords. Instead, Google wants
to educate “players” by being a knowledge-base.
Google says
the Knowledge Graph will allow us to “get a more complete picture
of what we’re curious about, exploring collections from the Knowledge Graph
and browsing lists of items, like museums in NYC
below, helping us research the topic faster and in more depth than before.
As stated
by Social Caffeine – Optimizing the Buzz in
Your Life “Google’s search is getting more intelligent. It’s all about
search engines thinking more like human beings. Knowledge Graph is the
first step towards search engines with human understanding”.
About The Semantic Web, Semantic
Search and Education
The term Semantic
Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web,
who defined it as "a web of data that can be processed directly and
indirectly by machines." In his article for the Scientific American
Magazine in 2001, he described his vision as “a new form of Web content
that is meaningful to computers and will unleash a revolution of new
possibilities”.
The Semantic
Web is a vision of the integration of information drawn from diverse
sources. The ability for machines to record how data relates to the real world,
and a shift from the need to access a series of data bases through a series of
searches, to the translation of content into machine readable information that
can be accessed through one unending data base.
Google’s
latest ‘shift’ to Knowledge Graph embraces the Semantic Web vision.
The ability
of teachers and students to draw on authentic and even ‘real time’ data from
across the world offers significant opportunities for learning and the curriculum
to become a ‘first-hand experience’.