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?"

Comments

Re:Hopefully Never

[ccady]

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.

Re:Hopefully Never

[null etc.]

When evaluating this technology's potential, one must take care to separate criticism of its view from the inherent data representation underneath.

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:

x.term.beginsWith ('c')
x.classification ('medical disease')
x.attributes.symptoms.searchTerms ('flour produce energy')

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.