Re: Basics of Effective Learning

> [[I quite liked Tom Gruber's keynote on 'Social Web'. Tom tried to avoid
> the controversial Web 2.0 term and talked rather of the collective
> intelligence of folksonomies, tagging, blogging, etc. It was good to

I liked his point that Web 2.0 is really "collected intelligence" and we
still haven't gotten to "collective intelligence".  :-)

> hear a talk that avoids the unnecessary controversy on the relationship
> between Web 2.0 and, say, the Semantic Web. Tom also talked about an
> attempt to give a more coherent ontological model for tagging, though it
> seems that this work is stalled due to missing people to work on it (see
> also an earlier blog[4] he had on this for some more details). Would be
> good to pick this up]]
> 
> Actually, the comment on Tim O'Reilly's blog that caught my eyes is the
> one of Steve Loughran. He says:
> 
> "semantic web is built on ontologies and ubiquitous RDF"
> 
> which, in this form, is incorrect and one of the 'myths' we do have
> around SW (maybe we should make it part of[5]), namely that any SW
> application must use ontologies, ie (according to this line of thought)
> has to use OWL, ie, is based on complex and difficult-to-understand
> concepts.

In itself, I don't think that statement is a myth.  You can't use RDF
without a shared understanding of what certain URIs mean, typically some
class and property URIs.  In Tom Gruber's world, at least, that shared
understanding is, loosely speaking, an ontology.  Strictly speaking, the
specification that enables that shared understanding is the ontology.
(He talked about this a bit at the keynote, but also in a document from
13 years ago, where I first saw his name [1].)

It would be good if we could come up with a simpler, more accepted term
for this concept.   Some options:

    ontology
    (controlled) vocabulary
    (data) dictionary
    (rdf) schema
    (data structure) interface
    language fragment

Doesn't look good.   :-)

    -- Sandro

[1] http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

Received on Sunday, 10 December 2006 15:03:28 UTC