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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A Few Thoughts on an Ontology as a Self OrganizingSystem
 Mike Champion wrote: > I can see the utility of ontology building in domains > where things more or less sit still while we examine > them, e.g. the assumptions about human anatomy and > physiology built into SNOMED (although I suppose that > it evolves fairly quickly as disease organisms evolve > and as the etiology of known diseases is better > understood. It's just not clear to me how that is > going to help us find stuff on the Web better than we > can with heuristic / statistical approaches. For > example, Google doesn't know a stinkin' thing about > "cameras" except that the word appears on a lot of > pages with words such as "picture" in it (and its > synonyms, equivalents in other languages, etc.), so it > has no trouble with the idea that a cellphone can also > be a camera. So, we can do useful things with these > statistically useful "attractors" of one term for > another in the space of actual documents that would > utterly defeat a reasoning agent with an out-of-date > ontology that is trying to figure out why anyone would > object to people bringing cellphones into a locker > room. In fairness, technologies like OWL don't know anything about "cameras" either. And unfairly, I could twist your argument as being equally against relational data, though I'm sure that's not your intention :) But think about FOAF, or calendaring - search engines may be good at determining the relative importance of some chunk of data, but they just couldn't begin to provide the sort of information a naive graph walker or inference engine could, given a set of foaf graphs, iCal, and a party to organize. There's a place for webtastic meatydata, and Google will doubtless leverage it, perhaps by warping the pagerank to provide trust metrics about data sources. > Sure, the approach Google uses is beginning to fall > apart under the various strains on it, and clearly the > world needs to keep working on this problem. There > may be some way to leverage relatively static > ontologies to steer one away from "false attractors", > but the only practical way I see to keep up with > evolving language is to continuously sample real > communications. Google's approach to query (pagerank) is fine, their approach to search (download the web into a refrigerated uber-cluster) has real issues - just because you're good with a shovel doesn't mean you're digging the right hole. Now, if something like jxta search ever caught on... Bill de hÓra 
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