For centuries, science (in German “Wissenschaft”) has aimed to create (“schaften”) new knowledge (“Wissen”) from the observation of physical phenomena, their modelling, and empirical validation.
Recently, a new source of knowledge has emerged: not (only) the physical world any more, but the virtual world, namely the Web with its ever-growing stream of data materialized in the form of social network chattering, content produced on demand by crowds of people, messages exchanged among interlinked devices in the Internet of Things. The knowledge we may find there can be dispersed, informal, contradicting, unsubstantiated and ephemeral today, while already tomorrow it may be commonly accepted.
The challenge is once again to capture and create consolidated knowledge that is new, has not been formalized yet in existing knowledge bases, and is buried inside a big, moving target (the live stream of online data).
The myth is that existing tools (spanning fields like semantic web, machine learning, statistics, NLP, and so on) suffice to the objective. While this may still be far from true, some existing approaches are actually addressing the problem and provide preliminary insights into the possibilities that successful attempts may lead to.
I gave a few keynote speeches on this matter (at ICEIS, KDWEB,…), and I also use this argument as a motivating class in academic courses for letting students understand how crucial is to focus on the problems related to big data modeling and analysis. The talk, reported in the slides below, explores through real industrial use cases, the mixed realistic-utopian domain of data analysis and knowledge extraction and reports on some tools and cases where digital and physical world have brought together for better understanding our society.
The presentation is available on SlideShare and are reported here below:
[slideshare id=80015494&doc=mythsandchallengesinknowledgeextractionandanalysisfromhuman-generatedcontentbrambilla-170921115827]
