What is an ontology anyway?

October 24, 2009 Leave a comment

Chances are anyone who has come across the terms ‘Semantic Web’ or ‘Web 3.0′, has also come across the term ‘ontology’. But what is an ontology anyway? For philosophers it is the study of all existence (including God’s!).

Computer scientists though have a more practical view of an ontology.A recent article in the IT Professional magazine of the IEEE Computer Society examines what an ontology means for the Semantic Web:

An ontology is a method of representing items of knowledge (ideas, facts, things, whatever) in a way that defines the relationships and classifica- tions of concepts within a specified domain of knowledge. It’s this ability to define a variety of useful relationships among items of knowledge, and to implement these relationships in software, that make an ontology such a powerful gadget in the knowledge manager’s toolkit.

You can download the complete article from here.

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Semantic search engine fails

September 6, 2009 Leave a comment


Newly launched semantic search engine HealthBase has listed “Jew” as a cause for AIDS. The official explanation is that this was caused by homonymy (words with the same spelling but different meaning):

The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease AIDS and the verb aids (as in aiding someone).

This was corrected shortly after spotted, but the search engine still suffers from poor analysis results. For example, in the causes of swine flu, we get “Australia”, “Vietnam”, and “Authority”.

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Semantics at the New York Times

June 25, 2009 Leave a comment

Who says the Semantic Web exists only in the minds of academics? Last week, at the closing keynote of the Semantic Technology conference, Rob Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times unveiled their plans of embracing the Semantic Web by releasing their corpus in the form of Linked Data. The vast amount of data owned by the New York Times will be a major addition to the rapidly growing Linked Data map. Larson pointed out:

It’s been fundamental to what we do for a long time. We feel we’re good at it, but our content is an island… This is wholly consistent with our open strategy… to facilitate access to slices of our data for those who want to include it in their applications.

Watch Larson’s announcement:

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Raw Data Now in the UK

June 20, 2009 1 Comment

Good news from the Raw Data Now front. Tim Berners-Lee has been asked by Gordon Brown to help open up access to government data in the UK. Let’s hope this is not just a publicity stunt to boost Mr Brown’s plummeting popularity, but a true effort in creating a more transparent government. If this works, it should point more governments towards this direction.

In the meantime, critics in the UK point out the great obstacles such an attempt will stumble upon. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones comments:

I fear Sir Tim may be in for a bruising few months, as he tries to convince Sir Humphrey et al to let it all hang out.

Clearly, a lot has to change in the idiosyncrasy of state officials for Sir Tim’s vision to fully come to life, but at least he’s been given this chance. Let’s just see how this goes…

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Web 3.0, Linked Data and the Semantic Web

May 26, 2009 Leave a comment

Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures, recently posted a series of articles about the latest trends on the web: Web 3.0, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web. Greg attempts an in-depth analysis of these concepts, the technologies and innovations behind them, and how they can be combined to form the next generation web. Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has posted a recap of these articles, together with some of his views on the future of the Semantic Web and the role of Google. Richard concludes:

It’s clear to us that the time for structured data has come. We’re beginning to see it in the current wave of Linked Data sets being released, and in the support that big companies, like Google and Yahoo, are showing for structured data. Who knows, maybe the Semantic Web is nearly upon us too.

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