A Few Observations about Ontologies

• Simple ontologies can be built by non-experts
  • Consider Verity’s Topic Editor, Collaborative Topic Builder, GFP interface, Chimaera, etc.
• Ontologies can be semi-automatically generated
  • from crawls of site such as yahoo!, amazon, excite, etc.
  • Semi-structured sites can provide starting points
• Ontologies are exploding (business pull instead of technology push)
  • most e-commerce sites are using them - MySimon, Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping,, VerticalNet, etc.
  • Controlled vocabularies (for the web) abound - SIC codes, UMLS, UN/SPSC, Open Directory (DMOZ), Rosetta Net, SUO …
  • Business interest expanding – ontology directors, business ontologies are becoming more complicated (roles, value restrictions, …)
  • DTDs are making more ontology information available
  • Markup Languages growing XML, RDF, DAML, RuleML, xxML
  • “Real” ontologies are becoming more central to applications

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