a look at SW problems

When I heard of semantic web for the first time, it reminded me the idea of creating a unique language for the whole world. However, we can see that people still speak English , Spanish, French and so on...  Then I was surfing the web for more information and as I got into the thing, I found the idea really bright, though quite challenging. I believe it has a bright future as it's not something artificial but is a natural extension of the current Web - with better defined information, making it understandable for computers and thus greatly fastening the process of data exchange.

Universality is the paramount property of the Web, and I guess the essential property of the contemporary world. To succeed, we should make it the basic principle of the research and development in the semantic web sphere. We should unite the best scientists from all over the world, and use the phylosophy from life sciences. For example, most researchers have noticed that the problem reminds of a Godel's theorem in Math: any system that is complex enough to be useful also encompasses unanswerable questions, much like sophisticated versions of the basic paradox "This sentence is false." We know how this has been solved traditionally within quite a narrow approach of each single paradigm. However, with all the knowledge we have gathered all over the centuries, we may overcome this and find new solutions that may be applied universally.

Among the 3 basic components of the semantic web, personally, I see most difficulties in ontologies. There have always been problems with defining relationships, sometimes the extentions is different in different dictionaries. I didn't have a chance to read much about that and honestly I prefer communicate with people instead of looking for specific information in a book or serching the web. How can we overcome the difference of extentions? What are we going to do with polysemous words? If anybody can give me some information or a link to a related article, I will appreciate it a lot.


Linda Ridgeway
Marketing and Research Manager
http://www.alierra.com
1-877-835-2635