Saturday, February 10, 2007

Applying Semantics in Real-Life

Today morning I was replying to an email from a friend of mine in India. While replying to her email I did remember doing different kind of analysis (which I normally do) based on the persons details. Actually its very interesting thing to do in its own right. You come across various facts about the person which he/she is not aware of.
  1. Using First Name, Last Name etc One can perform Name analysis of a person. As it is being believed that The name shapes a persons behavior. Similarly there are many other analysis on name can be performed.
  2. Using Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Time of Birth etc one can perform all sorts of Astrological calculation and find out more about the person.
  3. Education Details gives an indication of what the person's interest is. The interesting fact is the percentage of marks in individual subjects gives an inclination towards person's interest.
  4. The list is too long about the different kind of analysis we can perform on attributes (details) from one person.
But one you may ask how does this relate to my current work. Well its no different as I see. Going back to what Semantic Database is all about. Its an attempt to link information based on its meaning. This is how I see this being applied in real life. Say for example I have a Person object in my database. This is how different kind of details we can derive from a person's individual attribute.
  1. Using Date of Birth, Date of Anniversary we can schedule our system to send an automated greetings on those dates. This is particularly useful for a CRM application.
  2. Using Address we can calculate shipping cost for an item one buys from other supplier. This detail can be used for sending promotions to the person in that area.
  3. By analyzing persons Salary we can calculate taxes.
The World-Wide-Wait(WWW) is too big for one person to find all the information by him/her self. Millions of pages contain information which can only be understood by human being. There is no way in current scenario we can make computers understand those informations. To be frank Computers are still dumb :). In one of my earlier post on World-Wide-Web I had discussed why it is difficult to link bits of information today.

But I guess we had enough discussion about about the problems. The time has come when we need to work on solution part of it. This is how I see it being a reality.
  1. We need to identify an object as collection of objects, ie we should be able to break a big object into small-small manageable pieces (object).
  2. We need to develop a capability in the system to process each of the small objects in its own right of one big object as a whole.
  3. We need to have a system capable enough to take a small object (even though it is part of a big object) and perform actions on it if asked for.
  4. The system should be able to consolidate all the processing results into one final result keeping the individual existence of results intact.
  5. We should be able to identify these elements in the system and also be able to attach a processing logic to the same.
  6. The system should be able to provide a facility to create a workflow where we can group the processing logics and transform them into a big one.
There are many more things which could be added to the list (above) and the result will take us to build a system which works on the basis of meaning.

Until Next Time....:)