Ontology

I've launched into a project at last, a terminological database toolset that's been on the drawing board for a very long time indeed (with what I hope will prove to be an accompanying business model to harness it all), and one thing that I ran across in my initial data scheme for termbases is the "context" field. Logically, that context is an ontological specification - a kind of "where am I?" in the larger scheme of the vocabulary of the full language - and it's used to draw distinctions about the terminology used in specific applications.

Well, so I delved into the available literature about ontology tools. Of which there are many.  And I hadn't really looked in many years; they've proliferated, especially in the context of the semantic web and bioinformatics, so here's a partial linkdump of some of the information that looks most promising.

• A decent overview.
• KIF = Knowledge Interchange Format [here] [in SUMO]. This is a declarative language with LISP syntax used to express first-order logic predicates about concepts.
• SUMO = Suggested Upper Merged Ontology. Sort of the basic list of concepts that underlie everything else.
• Tips on ontology development. And pitfalls.
• A few basic tutorials about the semantic web. It's based on a graph database model (for semantic networks).
• RDF is used to encode chunks of graph data in the semantic web (it can also be embedded in HTML, of course).
• Ontological data about RDF documents is encoded in RDFS and OWL.
• OntoSelect is apparently a cataloging service for ontologies found/discovered on the Semantic Web - here's a mention, but the service itself seems to be down.
• Biology is another area where ontologies are used extensively; here, for example, is the Experimental Factor Ontology. Note that it is downloadable in OWL format. Experimental ontologies are generally available as free, open-source data, while anything with any hint of commercial usefulness is blisteringly expensive (pharmacovigilance, for example - the adverse effects ontology used for drug side effect reporting).
• The Gene Expression Atlas is also ontology-based. This is a real-world application of something that used to be considered hard AI, and I find that pretty fascinating in and of itself.
• Aaand a protein ontology that I've linked partly because proteins are inherently cool and partly because the legend is so pretty.
• Bioinformatics ontologies aren't always published in OWL; OBO is a competing standard. The Obofoundry catalogs a bunch of ontologies.
• Ontobee.org is an ontology viewer for ontologies published on the Web. Here's the display for an adverse event ontology.

There are reams and reams of information about ontologies these days. Those are the more interesting things I ran across while determining that I don't need to go into that kind of depth to do what I need to do.

LDSR

While sleuthing around with the Trados thing day before yesterday, since the key for Studio is "LDSRClient" (which brings back no Google hits), I naturally tried to figure out what language-related thing "LDSR" might be, and found the Linked Data Semantic Repository (now renamed as "FactForge" - the "fast track to the center of the Data Web"), which appears to be a collection of various, well, linked data from the Internet, in the form of semantic chunks of some kind.

Anyway, it's interesting stuff.

It's been used to (kind of) respond to something called the Modigliani test, which is essentially, "Given the fact that there is an artist named Modigliani, tell me where all his paintings are located using public data". That's actually impossible right now, but the guys responsible for FactForge tried their hand at it using their repository, and found six of the paintings in public data - which is really impressive! - but as they say, it took a trained expert an hour to assemble the query.

So: the Semantic Web, or the Data Web - interesting stuff.

Schema.org scraper

Does what it says on the tin, apparently. Interesting!

Journal on Data Semantics

So this is a thing.

Processing schema.org markup with Perl

Nice outline of quick extraction of semantic markup in Web pages using Perl and a microparser.

Adversarial design

Adversarial design is a way to present debates.  An example.

Google's knowledge graph

Google does semantics.

Finding resources on the Semantic Web

SparQL and the Semantic Web, and finding resources using semantic markup.

The Strong API

Some kind of ... thing for determining degrees of relatedness between terms using ... the semantic Web? Maybe? But it does look interesting!

Microformats

Here's a Wiki of "microformats" - semantic markup for various categories of things. Interesting effort. Filed under semantic Web, I guess?

Schema creator

A JS tool to create schema.org entities. Very neat!

Semantic markup

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo support schema.org: a central repository/specification for semantic markup. Yet another thing to master! (This is a good thing.)

The Semantic Web

Looks like this is starting to gain some momentum. I'm too tired to do anything with it just now beyond pointing and screaming, maybe hitting it with the thighbone of a dead animal - but later, boy howdy, later I'm going to understand the hell out of it.

More thoughts on invoices

In addition to a "brittle" definition of a specific data structure representing an invoice, a semantic programming system should have some general, dare I say semantic knowledge concerning invoices, and business processes in general, documents, and so on. In other words, there should be a semantic web, one view of which might be a specific data structure definition, and the system could interact with e.g. Perl code using that specific data structure definition - but it could also modify it based on what it knows about invoices.

That's pretty darned hand-wavy, but again: it's where I want to go.