Thoughts on Complexity - Ontologies

here is another take on complexity (my last post, referring also to Kurt Cagles' http://www.understandingxml.com/), and the problems that arise from complexity. Representing information is another problem where complexity can preclude any single approach to the problem. In order to find our way around large quantities of information it needs to be structured. But the information already exists and is still being created, so this makes it a moving target. I'm sure such matters will be covered at the www2006 conference at Edinburgh 23-26 May http://www2006.org/.

The structuring of ontologies from the top down can be useful, but can only be achieved where the ontology developers have some control over the information. Much of web development and other creation of information is bottom up, in that there is no controlling authority. This is good for inclusiveness and speed of development, and something that encourages community, and encourages individuals to create their own content, which is a good thing. In his interview with the British Computer Society Tim Berners-Lee http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4 in answer to a question on ontologies, talks of a top level ontology that can be created to hold certain terms and the need to find, out who is using these terms so that other web pages and databases can be categorised. This would be achieved using URIs and RDF. In answer to what Tim hopes to achieve, he talks of this bottom up development that is going on, using blogs, and wikis etc and a possible approach of 'web science' - 'the science and engineering of web based things that have a bottom up Web-like structure'.

I think this approach is highly relevant to my PhD research of user-driven programming. With UWE (University of the West of England), I'm putting forward a proposal for us and others to be involved in such an approach. In keeping with the open standard and open source approach I advocate above, the draft is available at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/semanticwebmodelling.htm. This proposal is to allow creation and use of models by a community and to provide ways of sorting, searching and navigating these models.

Tim-Berners-Lee's interview - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337.

This talk by Nigel Shadbolt explains research about coping with diverse sources of information - http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3043.

This article by Bill Thompson for the BBC technology site examines new developments in Web 2.0 technologies - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4842498.stm.