PhysOrg: Going from a 'Web of links' to a 'Web of meaning' (Again...)
PhysOrg: Going from a 'Web of links' to a 'Web of meaning': "Heflin recently received a five-year, $500,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study distributed ontologies that could bring the Semantic Web closer to reality....Researchers in artificial intelligence have proposed to make ontologies explicit, says Heflin. In computer science, an ontology encodes knowledge about the world, and can thus determine what is implied and find answers without explicit instructions. Ontologies can be used by people, and by databases and other applications that need to share information about domains, or specific subject or knowledge areas, such as cars, medicine or real estate...
Heflin wants to look at ways of partitioning the Web into useful subsets so users can determine which ontology to use when they have a query and can find an ontology that will point them to the web page that is most suited to the perspective of their search.
"I want to develop an underlying theory so we can understand and build a system that can handle large amounts of data," says Heflin. "That system should be able to look at medicine from the point of view of a patient, a doctor or a pharmaceutical manufacturer, or to search universities from a professor's or a student's point of view."
posted by Jen @ 6:32 AM
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