Re: Making human-friendly linked data pages more human-friendly

Paul A Houle wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Kingsley Idehen 
> <kidehen@openlinksw.com <mailto:kidehen@openlinksw.com>> wrote:
>
>     Schema Last vs. Schema First :-) An RDF virtue that once broadly
>     understood, across the more traditional DBMS realms, will work
>     wonders for RDF based Linked Data appreciation.
>
>
> That's the conclusion that I'm coming to.
>
> I've been think of the question of,  "what would Cyc look like if it 
> were started today?"
>
> Cyc took the "Schema First" approach to the human memome project:  as 
> a result it put a lot of work into upper and middle ontologies which 
> don't seem all that useful to many observers.  Despite a great deal of 
> effort put into avoiding 'representational thorns',  it got caught up.
>
> A modern approach would be to start with a huge amount of data over 
> various domains and to construct schemas using a mix of statistical 
> inference and human input.  The role of the upper ontology would be 
> reduced here,  because,  in general,  it isn't always necessary to 
> mesh up two randomly chosen domains,  say:  "bus schedules",  
> "anime",  "psychoanalysis",  "particle physics"
>
> Now,  somebody might want to apply the system to study the 
> relationship of "anime" with "psychoanalysis";  that could be 
> approached by constructing a metatheory (i) based on those particular 
> domains,  and (ii) conditioned by the application that the system is 
> being put to,  that is,  "on the bit",  connected via a feedback loop 
> to some means of evaluating the system's motion towards a goal.
>
> "Representational Thorns" get bypassed here because the system is free 
> to develop a new representation if an old one fails for a particular task.
Yes!
Recent SUMO, Wordnet, Yago, and DBpedia mapping also provides another 
mechanism for demonstrating all of this.

Basically, SUMO, OpenCyc, UMBEL, Yago etc.. remain strange second-class 
citizens of interest re. LOD, but in due course this will change, since 
without these compliments, the real power of Linked Data will remain 
mercurial across all practical dimensions.

Linked Data does provide both substrate and exploitation mechanism for 
ubiquitous smart data.

Note to all: you cannot have ubiquitous smart data without an ability to 
deal with context fluidity; someone will always have a different point 
of view, and that should be an acceptable part of the deal re. Linked 
Data driven metadata :-)

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Thursday, 17 September 2009 18:39:55 UTC