The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. DeepaMehta -- Homepage. Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web. Earlier this week we wrote about the classic approach to the semantic web and the difficulties with that approach. While the original vision of the layer on top of the current web, which annotates information in a way that is "understandable" by computers, is compelling; there are technical, scientific and business issues that have been difficult to address.
One of the technical difficulties that we outlined was the bottom-up nature of the classic semantic web approach. Specifically, each web site needs to annotate information in RDF, OWL, etc. in order for computers to be able to "understand" it. As things stand today, there is little reason for web site owners to do that. But there are alternative approaches. In this post, we will look at the solution that we call the top-down approach to the semantic web, because instead of requiring developers to change or augment the web, this approach leverages and builds on top of current web as-is. Why Do We Need The Semantic Web? Conclusion. Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.
Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus - An online thesaurus and dictionary of over 145,000 words that you explore using an interactive map. Thoughts on Google Plus: The Magic Isn’t Social, It’s Semantic. It’s been said that I’ve called Google Plus “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.”
I did, and you can listen for yourselves on the Semantic Link podcast. Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types, attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves. This is a “Field Trial,” so basic is just about all we should expect. Given the reported adoption rates, I think it’s made a pretty good start. Let’s take those points one at a time, with pictures. Persistent URIs for People Everyone with a G+ account gets assigned a random string of numbers as their unique identifier. [click images to open them at full size in new tabs/windows] How is this ontological? Persistent URIs for Sparks Why this Matters.