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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] How I learned to stop worrying and love the semantic web - was Re: [xml
 Note that I'm talking about the "semantic web" of actual technologies not the Semantic Web of certain visionaries ... and it's more respect than actual love. On Jun 12, 2004, at 12:32 PM, Jonathan Borden wrote: > SNOMED has been standardized as a medical ontology which as been > licensed by both the U.S. and U.K. governments for use in healthcare. > > ... > I'd say that this stuff is being used. Dismiss this at your own > discretion. Perhaps it doesn't affect your corner of the world. > Jonathan mentioning SNOMED a year or two ago in a previous incarnation of the permathread was the "aha!" moment for me. There are certainly corners of the world where systems of terminology/ontology are well enough established to make even the kinds of inferences possible with OWL/DL useful. I believe the example he used back then was something like querying a database that had no specific code for 'brain tumor' for all cases that involved a type of tumor occurring in the brain. If each case does have a SNOMED code associated with the diagnosis, a reasoner can infer whether or not that is a kind of brain tumor, without human intervention or an exceedingly complex query. Reasonable people can disagree over how many cases there are where a well-defined ontology exists; after all, the SNOMED folks just formalized the ontology implicit in medical theory and exploited nomenclature widely used in practice. That took a couple hundred (thousand?) years to get to its current state, and human physiology and (to a lesser extent) pathology hasn't evolved all that much during that time, so knowledge wasn't rendered obsolete every generation or so. My second epiphany about this stuff came more recently -- it became brutally clear that internet, XML and web services technologies had done a lot to remove the mechanical barriers to data interchange, so exchanging well-understood document, data records, and service invocations across platforms is no longer the painfully labor intensive proposition it was even a decade ago. Now that the plumbing is in place, however, it is clear that the barriers to effective communication lie more in what the data *means* than in what format it is in or what protocol will be used to exchange it. One might hope that industry-wide working groups will sort out the differences for each vertical.Wwheeooooffff [sound of dope smoke being inhaled ;-) ] One might hope that people will value interoperability more than inertia and adopt something like UBL [Kumbaya .... Kumbaya]. One might anticipate that some Omnipotent Entity such as the US government, WalMart, or Microsoft will just enforce uniformity [could happen, but the proles tend to resist such attempts by Big Brother]. One might much more plausibly believe, IMHO, that a) individual organizations can formalize what *they* mean by various terms, namespaces, etc. by reference to concrete documentation that describes them or software components/database fields that implement them; and b) that these private ontologies could be shared and mapped-between by those needing to exchange data across organizational boundaries. Maybe someday those will evolve into shared ontologies such as SNOMED, we shall see, but we don't need to believe in such things to use OWL, etc. to formalize and manipulate the private taxonomies/ontologies that are in actual use. The objection from the "XML is all you need" contingent seems quite well taken to me: At the end of the road, it comes down to bits on the wire that are being matched and manipulated. It may be that one can effectively cut out the ontological abstractions and deal directly with the syntax patterns and transformations (as XQuery and XSLT support quite well) in your domain of choice. My guess is that there is enough useful higher-level structure in natural language and the real world to give the exercise of building taxonomies/ontologies some real value in a lot of application domains now that there is a bit of a network effect around the "semantic web" [lower case!] tools that will make these things useable by ordinary programmers and human end users. The OWL Guide begins: "The World Wide Web as it is currently constituted resembles a poorly mapped geography. Our insight into the documents and capabilities available are based on keyword searches, abetted by clever use of document connectivity and usage patterns. The sheer mass of this data is unmanageable without powerful tool support. In order to map this terrain more precisely, computational agents require machine-readable descriptions of the content and capabilities of Web accessible resources" I guess I've stopped worrying about the grandiosity of this vision (and the fact that we're muddling through with all sorts of little things like Google and WSDL fairly nicely), and learned to respect the value of machine readable descriptions of local resources, and the potential this has for reducing the complexity exposed to developers and users. We shall see ... 
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