Re: comments on http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-webont-req-20020307

*Marton Trencseni wrote*

> "Ontologies can be used to provide semantic annotations for collections
> of images, audio, or other non-textual objects. These annotations can
> support both indexing and search."

> what exactly do you mean by indexing vs. searching? indexing as in
> determining what directory to list a certain site (piece of multimedia)
> under? it seems to me, that one of the benefits of the "web of
> ontologies" ("ontology of the web"?) would be, that such people
> searching wouldn't have to rely on such directories.

What I understand there from a topic map viewpoint - assuming the fundamental topic map
concepts be expressed in OWL - is that indexing a resource may mean several things, e.g
the following:
-- asserting that the resource is an occurrence of a topic
e.g. a portrait of Newton is an occurrence of a topic representing Newton.
-- asserting that the resource (reified as a topic) is an instance of a class of resources
-- asserting specific association(s) linking the reified resource and its indexing
topic(s), and using the roles expressed by metadata or annotations (author, publisher,
subject ...)

All that is more versatile than simply putting a file in a folder (e.g. a website in a
directory), since any of the above assertions is valitated in a scope (domain, language,
viewpoint, user culture, preferences, rights or profile), and different or even
contradictory indexing assertions may be expressed in different scopes (e.g. different
viewpoints on the identity of the guy on this fuzzy picture, or of the author of that
anonymous letter)
Searching will be supported by such indexing, both for people browsing a semantic network
of topics and associations in a specific scope, and for automatic queries in the graph
representing the network.

Bernard

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Bernard Vatant - Consultant
Mondeca - "Making Sense of Content"
www.mondeca.com
bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
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Received on Saturday, 30 March 2002 05:50:54 UTC