Community Driven Ontology Development - Memomics.com

Chapter: New York City

Date: Oct 1, 2007 · 7:00 PM

Location: American National Standards Institute, 25 W 43rd St, New York, NY, 10036, US

Community Driven Ontology Development - Memomics.com Marc Hadfield, Alitora Systems, Inc.

The Semantic Web, or the "Data Web", needs a number of technologies, standards, protocols, and services to be widespread before value can be fully realized.

Progress has been made in standards such as RDF, OWL, and Microformats, but there are many gaps to be filled.

One such gap is a unified source of Ontologies that can be easily utilized by the entire Internet Community in a seamless fashion, with Ontology development driven by the Internet Community.

This service is critical to the continued growth of the Semantic Web. An uncoordinated proliferation of ontologies does not enable sharing of information beyond the local ontology "walled garden"; it is a reimplementation of another level of "Babel". It serves no purpose for wide spread data sharing on the web to move from not speaking the same XML to not speaking the same Ontology.

Thus, a Community driven service must encourage Ontology re-use rather than re-invention, and allow ontology experts, domain experts, and "consumers" of ontologies to co-exist, and in fact, leverage each other.