Comments on: From the Metaweb to the Semantic Web: A Roadmap

By: mediatope II

mediatope II — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 12:50:20 +0000

a cumulative Web 2.0 definition …

… quite provisory, of course. Mainly based on the proto-definition work of richard mcmanus’ writereadweb, still the most important resource for Web 2.0. The wikipedia-entry is also valuable, despite being “disputed”. At present I see five characteris…

By: Dr Paul Prueitt

Dr Paul Prueitt — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 01:22:59 +0000

We are interested in a collaboration.
Dr Paul Prueitt
Founding Committee
BCNGroup
We do not have funding right now, but have some good contacts. The question is about whether the architecture we have specified solves certain problems that have been with AI
See RoadMap (Microsoft Word doc)
http://www.bcngroup.org/area1/2005beads/GIF/RoadMap.doc

By: sabiene

sabiene — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 09:32:17 +0000

My respect! Very interesting site – a good resource for everybody!

By: Marguerite Ardito

Marguerite Ardito — Mon, 05 Jan 2004 16:14:23 +0000

You are zeroing in on the problem when you say:
“…there is really no easy way to make use of extensions, and secondly, they do not provide semantically defined metatags. Anyone is free to extend such formats with whatever custom metatags they want to put in, but currently there is no way to instantly make those metatags useful in applications that were not written specifically to recognize them, nor is there a way to semantically define the meaning of those tags so that software can understand how to interpret them without human intervention.”
Ontologies may provide part of the answer, but only part and anyway how do you make ontologies interoperable and automatable by an undetermined application? You might want to take a look at what OMG is doing with MOF (Meta Object Facility). You may find concepts there that can be adapted to the MetaWeb.
As you hint, what’s data and what’s metadata depends on the point of view. In MOF Level 1 Metadata is a model of real world data (Level 0). (I’m using metadata in the sense of information that defines and controls the meaning and structure of data – not descriptive metadata which is really just another kind of data.) Just as metadata makes data “smart”, there needs to be a mechanism to make metadata smart – i.e. to model the metadata – to define and control its meaning and structure so it can be automated. This is where the Level 2 Meta Model comes in – a way to define the language of the metadata.
Finally you need a way to model the meta model (Level 3 or Meta Meta Model) so that your models and meta models can be interchanged with people and applications using a different modeling approach (e.g. relational database).
This (or a similar – maybe with additional dimensions) 4 level meta-structure concept (combined with additional ideas from XML registries) might be partial keys to realizing the full potential for interoperability across metaweb, databases, applications (services) and unstructured content. (stealth radar will detect big blue whales in this vicinity.)

By: Lucas

Lucas — Tue, 16 Dec 2003 01:49:34 +0000

It seems to me that the greatest benefit of a a standard “metaweb” ontology is simply the fact that it is a standard, that everyone is speaking the same langauge.
I think that the ontological infrastructure that wins will be the one that can bootstrap itself. By this I mean an ontology that contains data pertenent to consensus building, such as: opinions on a specific topic, polls, reviews of standards, etc. For this to work a distributed reputation system I think would be mandatory, and not just a good idea.

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:31:14 +0000

PS. It just occurred to me that your ontology may not RDF/OWL-based. It also occurred to me that there are existing ontologies that cover the areas you mention: documents [Dublin Core], events [iCal], projects, tasks [http://purl.org/stuff/project#] , people, groups [FOAF].
How then does it differ from these?
PPS. I’ve just had my agents noseying around, and spoken to a few bots and it doesn’t look like our paths have crossed before. So I’d better formally say “hi!”, I’ve been working around the same area for the past few years.

By: Raw

Raw — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:29:34 +0000

From the Metaweb to the Semantic Web: A Roadmap

In previous articles on this Weblog I have suggested that we name the new evolution of the Web that…

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 13:27:44 +0000

Great stuff!
Any examples of the kind of terms in “The Infoworker Ontology”?

By: mediatope

mediatope — Thu, 11 Dec 2003 12:27:38 +0000

Materialsammlung: Weblogs

Allgemein Dave Winer: What makes a weblog a weblog? Für Winers Harvard-Blawg-Projekt geschriebene Intro.