It was a great pleasure teaming up with Ron Kaplan (Powerset/Microsoft), Riza Berkan (hakia) and Kiki Hempelmann (RiverGlass) in this panel presentation on Semantic Search Beyond RDF at SemTech 2009 conference.  What is semantics, what is not?  It is quite interesting to hear different perspectives.  Particularly, is statistics semantics?  One often hears the statement that statistics is not semantics.  Then what about contextual semantics?

Statistics are only numbers, but with enough of the right kinds of numbers, one can model the economy of Uzbekistan, prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or characterize the content of a text document. Numbers are our friends, if we treat them with proper respect.

The important thing is to keep an open mind when it comes to semantic search.  But we do have one thing in agreement – semantic search CAN go beyond RDF markups.  The question is a matter of how.

Scalability and standard measurements are still hot topics around semantic search during the Q&A session.  When the question of benchmarks for comparing search systems came up, each of the panelists agreed that there is NO one benchmark number that can be used to compare all search systems simply because it is hard to interpret and may not make sense to one’s business.