Ontologies

Sometimes massive intersections happen in business.  New technologies -- create new cultures.  And new cultures -- create disruption and opportunities.  And, so, new paradigms emerge.  So it is with big data meeting the global network of social networks.  But first, let’s tip-toe into this big theme.

I spent a couple of days recently at the Semantic Technology 2011 conference in San Francisco.  A number of different themes and implementations struck a chord with me – and I could overview these all together at length.  But for now I will focus on two particular implementations that showcase both success, for all of us to learn from, and themes/directions, for information management professionals to pay heed to.  These two themes, in my view of this conference, are: Ontology is the New Taxonomy and Managing Vocabulary to Build Semantics-Based Knowledge Experiences.

In this post I want to begin a discussion on the first--using semantic technology to build ontology-based websites--by telling the story of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) World Cup Website.  Quite apart from it being a landmark achievement, there are also huge implications for those who build taxonomies – since taxonomies as we currently know them (“flat” hierarchies, faceted or not) are likely going to play a more minor role in the emerging semantic web world.  

This presentation by John O’Donovan (now at the Press Association, but then chief architect of BBC News and Sport Interactive) of the work at the BBC was the first that strongly resonated with me.

Briefly stated, The BBC's World Cup web site was almost certainly the biggest (at its time) pure-play implementation of semantic web technologies on a commercial media site.  Or … as one pundit put it …if there was a World Cup for the Semantic Web, then the BBC may have lifted the trophy for its country.”  There you go … Brit humor in action.  If you can’t excel at the sport …  then at least you can excel at something else.  I, being British, love it. :-)

Taxonomy consultants, such as those at Earley & Associates, may be the ones who develop a taxonomy for an organization, but the organization's own staff will ultimately be responsible for maintaining it, so the question arises what tool or tools should be used the maintain that taxonomy and perhaps further develop it. A taxonomy may be implemented in a CMS, in SharePoint, or with search (Google Search Appliance, FAST, etc.), but these systems do not have taxonomy management components.

An interest in taxonomy tools was evident by the number of chat-based questions that my colleague Seth Maislin and I received from participants in this week’s Taxonomy Community of Practice Call, Cross-Mapping Taxonomies, which we jointly presented. There is a need for tools that do more than merely enabling manual adding and deleting of terms. Mapping two taxonomies is something that only a few tools support, but there are many other day-to-day taxonomy management activities that also require specialized taxonomy management software.

This week several Earley & Associates consultants, including myself, participated in a special training on Smartlogic Ontology Manager, a good example of full-featured taxonomy management software. The question arises:  is this taxonomy management or ontology management software?

If we look at competing software products, we see various designations: