The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory :

"All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

"The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all."

Jim Gray's Wisdom

Here are some notes when i was reading the special issue of SIGMOD record for Jim Gray in June, 2008.

• "I am sort of interested in everything."
• "If you're in hurry to get out, you do a theoretical thesis"  --Jim's reason for doing a theoretical thesis.
  
• "One of the things that my research advisor Mike Harrison taught me to do is to write things down....One consequence of this is that I wrote lots of papers....One consequence of that is that i got to be very famous for the work of a lot of other people which is not fair."
• Performance is not an issue any more. Simplicity is a big issue."
• "If you take the road view of the focus of SIGMOD, the ni think actually databases are a growing field. If you take a narrow view, it is dying." --Jim's comment on the difference of MOD( management of data) and MOI( management of information).
• "I always tried to be in a situation where iI could quit the job I was doing that very day if the need came. I think that was liberating."
• "The world needs a couple of lunatics and it needs a lot of solid research. You can either try to be Pasteur and do really innovative experiments or you can be one of the not so well-known scientists who came after Pasteur and built on this work."
• 
  
• "The original B-tree paper was bounced; the data cube paper was bounced. The transaction paper that we sent in was bounced. Any paper that is non-linear is going to get bounced" --Jim comments on paper rejection. Quite an encourage to me, ha!

When i read about all these stories about Jim, the most i am impressed was not his achievement but his personality reflected by the numerous small touching stories offered by his colleagues, students, friends....

Where semantic search positions itself?

Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality :"Way too often we forget that semantic technologies are here to help us represent relational data spread over the entire web - so it should be no surprise to us that it is relational queries that semantic search engines would excel at."

"Presenting a search box is both misleading and detrimental, as people associate it with the simplistic questions that Google solves without any problems. "

Google has its strength to answer simple questions, which are exactly what people are good at formulating, by simple statistics based answers. It makes no sense for semantic search engine like powerset/hiakia to compete with Google on answering such simple inputs from that tiny search box. Instead, i really thinks the future for semantic search relies on its ability of creating an innovation UI to help users formulate complex queries, which are what people want to ask, or even more intelligent, to understand user's need and have machine formulate it into complex queries, and answer them.

You see, there is a gap we need to fill.