Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Developing Intelligent Applications on Web

I was reading a book on Creating meaning on Web and sharing information on Semantic Web. While going thru pages I came across one good extract from an article from Fensel and Brodie, 2003. They mentioned a 3 level solution to the problem of developing intelligent applications on the web.

Information Extraction:
In order to provide access to information resources, information extraction techniques have to be applied providing wrapping technology for a uniform access to information.

This directly corresponds to different approaches which is taken to access the information and interpret them.

Processable Semantics: Formal languages have to be developed that are able to capture information structures as well as meta-information about the nature of information and the conceptual structure underlying an information source.

This here refers to the recently developed specifications like XML, RDF, OWL in conjunction with Syntactical and structural approaches.

Ontologies: The information sources have to be enriched with semantic information using the language mentioned in step above. This semantic information has to be on a vocabulary that reflects a consensual and formal specification to the conceptualization of the domain, also called an ontology.

This directly corresponds to the recent efforts made by scientific community to enrich the Semantic Web in terms of Meta Annotation and Term Definitions.

While much has been talked about the later two. The first element i.e. the information extraction is still a puzzle for many people in the scientific community. This is due to the heterogeneous nature of the web. Where the heterogeneous not only in terms of data, but also in terms of the logic to interpret the data and the context in which the data element is being used.

To retrieve the information semantically we need to build the data in semantic way. Unless we adopt to a standard which is sufficient enough to describe the smallest entity in the system and can be scaled to the largest entity using the same mechanism, the achieving true semantic is almost next to impossible. In one of my earlier post about Atomicity I had explained how the principle of atomicity can be scaled from an atom to a large scale enterprise database. May be we can leverage on the same concept and build something which is good enough for the Semantic Web.

Until Next Time...:)

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Facet Classification systems offer a unique purview into different ways to structure applications. I suggest you google around for articles on this. If you e-mail me, then I might have some free time to send you some articles. Right now, I am just passing by as I found your blog... so I don't have the time to dig things up.