The standard for defining ontologies these days is OWL and Protege. Unfortunately, OWL lacks any notion of exceptions in inheritance or any other notion of defeasibility. So, although you may want to say that birds fly, you’re ontology will be broken (or become much more complicated) when you realize there are birds that can’t fly, [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Semantic Web’
Time for the next generation of knowledge automation
In preparing for my workshop at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas on November 5th, I have focused on the following needs in reasoning about processes, about events, and about or over time: Reasoning at a point within a [business] process Reasoning about events that occur over time. Reasoning about a [business] process (as [...]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Ontology
A panel on whether or not ontology is needed to achieve a collective vision for the semantic web was held on Tuesday at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009) near Washington, DC. For most of the panelists the question was rhetorical. But there were a few interesting points made, including that machine learning of [...]
The Semantic Arms Race: Facebook vs. Google
As I discussed in Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web, Radar Networks’ Twine is one of the more interesting semantic web startups. Their founder, Nova Spivak, is funded by Vulcan and others to provide “interest-driven [social] networking”. I’ve been participating in the beta program at modest bandwidth for a [...]
Cyc is more than encyclopedic
I had the pleasure of visiting with some fine folks at Cycorp in Austin, Texas recently. Cycorp is interesting for many reasons, but chiefly because they have expended more effort developing a deeper model of common world knowledge than any other group on the planet. They are different from current semantic web startups. Unlike Metaweb’s [...]