Noise Between Stations

Ontologies

  • We’ll Reach the Semantic Web One Small Step at a Time

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    1 min read

    XFN and FOAF were two small steps in that direction, and Google just built on them with the Social Graph API (watch the friendly little video intro). Any day now we’ll see an application that not only helps us generate XFN and FOAF data, but does so in a way that manages our online identities,…

  • Ethnoclassification and retrieval

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    2 min read

    I’ve been doing some product development consulting for a content-centric company, and started to wonder if ethnoclassification could benefit them somehow. I was hard-pressed to think of how, after the content was tagged, the tags would lead to better sets of content. Although they have a lot of content, they only have a few authors…

  • Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools

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    3 min read

    Excerpts from Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools: With databases virtually all of the semantic content has to be captured in the application logic. Ontologies, however, are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterizing the way knowledge in that domain…

  • Article: The Semantic Website

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    2 min read

    Get a pot of coffee or two in me and out pops another article, this time in Digital Web under the unwieldy title of Smarter Content Publishing, Building a semantic website to increase the efficiency and usability of publishing systems. Don’t bother reading it, I’ll sum it up for you: Manually marking up HTML is…

  • Introduction to Ontologies from McGuinness

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    1 min read

    Deborah L. McGuinness, ontology goddess, released Ontologies Come of Age, a chapter to an upcoming book. A relatively gentle introduction, along the way she illustrates the difference between controlled vocabularies and ontologies: the former have implicit is-a relationships and the latter have explicit is-a relationships (e.g. in a taxonomy a Merlot is a narrower term…

  • Topic Maps vs. RDF

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    2 min read

    Steve Pepper, author of The Tao of Topic Maps (and whose title, incidentally is Information Architect) – makes a concise, interesting comparison of Topic Maps and RDF, arguing for the former. Here’s a few points that struck me: One key difference – I don’t know if it is the key difference – is that topic…