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Nature Ontologies

nature.com

23 pointsphilbo4 comments

"He (Tim Berners-Lee)expressed the belief that Semantic Web technology will advance the information revolution he began with the World Wide Web, changing everything from how users set up their online address books to how they pay their taxes."

The semantic web is underrated.

http://goo.gl/YCc1Ly

The problem with the semantic web is that radical meaning variance is alive and well. As a friend who works in GIS for geology says, "If I send a team of geologists out to map a region, when I put their data together I can tell who mapped where but not what anyone mapped."

There are ways in carefully controlled situations (like geological mapping) to deal with this, but in the uncontrolled wilds of the web we don't have any very good idea of how to handle it. Published ontologies are a hopeful attempt to get people to agree, but how they are interpreted by different individuals will still vary a great deal, because it always involves mapping the individual's ontologies (plural) onto the published document and that will rarely happen cleanly.

To take a likely quite common example: a published ontology may put A and B in the same genus, whereas you or I might give each one a different genus, based on our understanding of the world. You see this a lot when crossing between fields, as a pure physicist will often have a quite different set of abstract categories than an applied physicist, an engineer, or a mathematician, much less a geologist or biologist. And individuals within fields vary a great deal as well. So what you end up with, while better than nothing, is still some kind of weird and disjoint intersection between the published ontology and the personal ontologies of all the people who use it.

Automated tools for processing documents and inferring their semantic categories may help enough for the semantic web to be useful, but it'll take a concerted effort to ensure that such tools produce vaguely similar results, and we aren't there yet by a long shot. And then there's the problem of deliberate gaming.

As such, I don't think the semantic web is "under-rated" so much as it is still, after almost 20 years, in the early days of development work on a very hard problem.

I think the really hard problems are almost unsolvable so waiting for them to be fixed before putting effort into this area doesn't seem wise.

In general we need a common mechanism to be able to make simple factual assertions in a web page or when describing a data flow.

The other very significant problem is that learning the technologies around rdf/owl/sparql is a lot of work and to be honest about it, most developers refuse to even learn sql properly.

I'm hopeful google's slow but steady focus on web page/email markup(for google now) will get the momentum behind solving some of the simple problems that it's insane we still have (things like, is there an address that describes this businesses location somewhere on this web page?).

Not 100% on topic, I find Cory Doctorow's essay "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia"[1] addresses certain shortcomings of his vision quite well.

[1] http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

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