Re: Serendipity will build the semantic web

Chimezie — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:57:10 -0000

Hello Phil, first (and off topic) I'm a big fan of your work. I wasn't aware that that you were also the author of BicycleRepairMan (quite an impressive software package - a shame development on it halted).

Regarding disambiguating seperate terms for the same concept, I think this is less a problem with the scheme of identification (URIs) than it is with bad ontological modeling practice. This problem will always arise if those responsible for developing the defining vocabulary do not take advantage of existing vocabularies and start with a bottom-up approach. Ofcourse, there are issues with coming in the other direction (starting with a *universal* ontology such as SUMO/CYC and working down towards the specific domain in question): rarely will you find such an ontology that covers *every* aspect of the knowledge domain you intend to model.

"This is achieved by leveraging existing real-world semantic grounding in shared (and well known) terms, and then requiring that clients do their own work in using context to disambiguate terms."

I don't see this as an alternative way of identification but rather an emphasis on rigorous vocabulary / ontology building practices. The language-based short text tags work well in the folksonomy scenario primarily because they rely on a well mapped , universal concept model: human language. But even there, you have issues with tags such as todo, RDF_related, semantic_web_papers, and such.

Taking the time to investigate existing vocabularies that have some overlap in the domain being modelled will go a long way in eleviating such ambiguity when creating terms in a vocabulary (in the same way putting thought into the tags you use in folksonomy systems goes a long way in making such a cataloging mechanism very useful). Ofcourse there is an incredible lack of such vocabularies, mostly because the era in software development where there is an added emphasis on modeling concepts instead of data (in the purest sense) is relatively contemporary (but picking up momentum - with advancements in Semantic Technologies).

Re: Serendipity will build the semantic web

Chimezie — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 08:19:51 -0000

somewhat related, see: http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2005-09-24/bnode_d...

Re: microqueries

Chimezie — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 10:03:36 -0000

Phil, where you find the Sparql / SQL approach doesn't cut if for you (and it never has for me), you might find the Versa equivalent more palpable. It's written with the RDF model in mind and is influenced by more recent precedent than SQL (REGEX and XPath)

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versa

Re: Refactoring the singleton state out of Bicyclerepairman

Chimezie — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:52:45 -0000

Glad to hear that bicyclerepairman is getting a new lease on life :)

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