Does the Semantic Web require everybody to subscribe to a single, predefined, giant ontology?
Obviously, that would not be feasible. If ontologies are used, they can come from anywhere and be mixed freely. In fact the “ethos” of the Semantic Web is to share and reuse as much as possible, and lot of work is done to semi-automatically bridge different vocabularies. Typical Semantic Web applications mix ontologies developed by different communities on the Web, like the Dublin Core metadata, FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) terms, etc. The Semantic Web’s attitude to ontologies is no more than a rationalization of actual data-sharing practice. Applications can and do interact without achieving or attempting to achieve global consistency and coverage. A system that presents a retailer’s wares to customers will harvest information from suppliers’ databases (themselves likely to use heterogeneous formats) and map it onto the retailer’s preferred data format for re-presentation. Automatic tax return software takes bank data, in the bank’s preferred format, and maps them onto the tax form. Ther
Related Questions
- Does the Semantic Web require me to manually markup all the existing web-pages, or to convert all the data in relational databases into RDF?
- Does the Semantic Web require everybody to subscribe to a single, predefined, giant ontology?
- What is involved in developing an ontology using Semantic Web technologies?
