Ontologize!

Building Practical Web Applications with Linked Data

Of all the funny riffs on Phil Karlton’s famous quote, my favorite is:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

Ontology is about naming things.

In information science, an ontology is a vocabulary described in a formal language that defines a set of concepts, categories, properties and relationships that represent a subject. This is not limited to a specific language or technology—many 2wav projects apply these principles without using any typical ontology language or tools.

With respect and gratitude to the information scientists, data scientists, bioinformaticists, and ontologists who use ontologies to tackle complex knowledge problems, the specialized tools used by these experts are impractical for most web programming. I wrote a whitepaper introducing our approach to using semantic web tools like RDF, OWL and linked data in a practical and familiar web programming environment.

If you are unfamiliar with RDF & OWL, you don’t need to be a master to make use of the techniques here. A quick study of the W3C OWL Web Ontology Language Guide, or my favorite primer from Cambridge Semantics, should be enough to get started.

I invite you to join our email list and receive your complimentary copy of the Ontologize! whitepaper.

—V. Anderson Wiese II
Founder of 2wav