Entity Tags

The following is a concept for a very simple (poor man's) tagging scheme for
marking up entities (instances) imbedded within html web pages. The terms
that are to be designated as instances of classes or properties of some
external rdfs/owl ontology are marked up using an html-like tag <eN uri of
ontology:class/property-name /eN>, where N is the number of words in the
instance name. This simple entity tag provides the information needed to
locate the relevant ontology and the class or property within that ontology
to which the instance applies. It also prevents the entity markup from
displaying on the rendered web page. Using entity tags would prevent the
need to embed rdfs/owl in the html page but still allow for the simple
association of instances with ontologies in situations where that might be
useful. Spiders could be designed to collect and catalog the resulting
ontology and instance information for use by query engines and/or agents.
This represents only very early thinking about such a concept, but with some
refinement it might provide a simple way for people who are only familiar
with html web site creation to begin to become involved in the development
of the Semantic Web.

 

Additional description and some examples of entity markup using the FOAF and
Wine ontologies, and an example of the cataloged results, are at (1). 

 

(1) http://semanticsimulations.com/EML.htm 

 

John Flynn