August 8, 2005

Evil Hierarchy vs. Good Tags

Peter Merholz takes on anti-ontological ideology in Clay Shirky's Viewpoints are Overrated.

Clay's whole argument predicates a black-and-white distinction between evil hierarchy on one side and good tags on the other... And while Clay is right to question hierarchy, and, particularly, Yahoo's less-than-optimal use of it, he neglects to distinguish truly useful forms of professionally-created classification and categorization, which undermines his argument. Source: peterme.com

These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content. Contrast this with the Semantic Web, which requires that you get a large group of people to agree on the schema of everything. Source: OnLamp

Here's a revolutionary concept: bottom-up and top-down approaches to developing theory and technology are not mutually exclusive.

May 6, 2004

Casual Ontology Development

Members of the Mindswap Project have posted Lifecycle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process for presentation at the WWW2004 WE-SW Workshop.

The paper begins with an interesting description of a short-hand version of OWL which is designed for rapid entry and clarity.

We limit expressivity (i.e. no support for nested restrictions etc) to maintain readability, yet provide sufficient building blocks to construct a basic ontology model quickly, that can be refined later using a more powerful ontology editing tool. A more formal approach to our shorthand notation is being developed at the side. Source.

Lifecycle then describes a design scenario in which Mindswap's SWOOPed toolkit is used to search for and import terms related to the ontology under construction.

Having found related concepts/properties that the user could potentially use in the ontology being created, the editor interface must provide the user with the ability to either link to the data directly (with or without importing the entire external ontology) or borrow a specific subset of it (using a copy-paste mechanism). Source.

March 31, 2004

Charette Relationship Set

Michael Scherotter has posted the RDF schema for his Charette Relationship Set. The design of CRS is to represent basic information about resources and relationships that a person would like to make available to the public.