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C|Net Integrates Ontology Viewer Into News Site
ikewillis writes "The new beta version of news.com now features an integrated ontology viewer developed in collaboration with LivePlasma who appears to have built a large ontology for music and movies. While they don't appear to provide direct access to the ontological data using semantic web formats like OWL and RDF, it's the first time I've ever seen web ontologies used on such a high profile site. How long until we can expect web ontology viewers (and semantic web integration) for sites like Wikipedia?"
That's nice. I'm still boycotting so-called "news".com.com.com after the uncalled-for article in which they posted personal information about Google's co-founders.
Furthermore, "news".com.com.com posts favorable "reviews" of its advertisers and slights those who do not purchase enormous ads on its web site. I'll stick with Objective Neutral news, thank you very much.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
I am disappointed with the lack of support in MediaWiki for ontologies and controlled vocabularies. I have been playing around with wikis for annotating outdoor activities my site at outdoordb.org and I am finding that it would be great to have tighter integration of controlled vocabularies. For example, if a hike occurs in Mt. Rainier National Park, I have to make sure that it is always annotated as the same string, instead of annotating with a key that always refers to Mt. Rainier NP. Users who annotate using different strings (such as 'Mount Rainier NP') either need to be fixed or they remain semantically disjointed. The cool thing about wikis is that these ontologies could grow with the knowledgebase, and allow users to select existing terms as they are needed. They could even be extracted and used elsewhere. If the edit page had an 'insert term' button, it could take care of the backend on its own, maybe using categories as an ontology.
The Open Directory Project
I would think the significant volunteer work done towards creating a freely-usable (with attribution) ontology of the web would be useful for a project such as this, even if the actual *content* wasn't.
The same for use in WikiPedia, actually... hmm.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I don't think you know how it is used in CompSci...
From dictionary.com:
2. (From philosophy) An explicit
formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts
and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of
interest and the relationships that hold among them
Feel free to check out citeseer for more ontology information.
The CNet "ontology" is more of a topic graph though.
... and did anybody notice after you visit the beta version of site, you are automatically pushed back to it whenever you try to go to the regular news.com? (try it with these links -- weird) Looks like some cookie magic. Looks like they want their readership to fall over to the new site. Considering this is /. it's more like a mass exodus to the beta version.
There are many area where an ontological search (not necessarily graphical like C|Net) is very useful. For example. I started writing a search engine for medical texts which used a medical ontology underneath. It made it so you could search for "heart attack" and get back results about "myocardial infarction" which never mentioned the term "heart attack."
An ontology can make your search much better.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
For instance, as useful as Google is, it's a pain to try to perform queries for things such as "a disease that begins with the letter 'c' and involves a body's inability to produce energy from flour-based foods". With an ontology-based data source, one simply needs to write an interface that allows the user to construct such queries using a formal grammar:
etc. that's just one possible example, but semantic knowledge is infinitely more powerful than grammatical knowledge, and ontology is the genesis requirement of semantic webs.Excellent, I have been lacking an easy to access directory of birds. Owls, eagles, falcons, finches.. these are all things I am now able to view while browsing a technology news website.
Thank you, Science Of The Intercyberwebsupernet.
In the dot com days, they'd have been trillionaires for doing something like this.
There are many and varied definitions, including yours BTW, which the Troll modders apparently didn't bother checking.
Google define:Ontology
The definitions vary so much that ontology is in danger of losing its traditional meanings to become a buzzword that doesn't actually mean anything other than "we are going to use this new jargon word for our patents now that we have hired an internet founder or some other famous figure who has agreed to back us up on our use of the term despite the conceptual existence of alternatives." If your post isn't perfectly informative, at least it can be insightful.
Reinvention of the lexicon is a possible backdoor into the patent system for pre-existing technologies, or technologies that are similar to pre-existing functions for the same thing. They are basically renamed so as to appear like something new, and if it is official-sounding enough (ontology sounds like a pretty serious term...), they may be able to pass under the patent office's radar. If the patent office doesn't watch for this exploit, we will end up with a bunch of overlapping cruft. (Not that that isn't already the case.)
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."