Getting back to basics - it is all about providing meaning to information so that it can be interpreted by systems. In school we learned the basic parts of grammar for whatever our native language, we learned about nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. It is a good idea to cast your mind back to these basics as we search for ways to create machine based meaning.
The human mind has developed an ability to interpret the same words in different contexts. For example bus can be a part of a computer or something you ride to work. If I say "the bus comes at 10:15" our minds interpret that I am talking about the type with wheels, whereas if I say "the bus runs a one megabit per second" the computer component is inferred.
In the mid nineties a small group of researchers working for an oil company launched a major initiative to create what we called the Context Information Base. There are many disciplines involved in oil and gas exploration, each of these has its own specific types of data as well as some common overlapping terms.
We based our development upon a model developed by Mike Mohammed, which we called Mike's Meta Model. The meta model facilitated mapping between contexts much as a language translator would between languages. We had some significant success with the approach. In fact the work was only stopped because we discovered that integrating the information created significant changes in business process which were difficult to implement on anything other than a small team scale.
So for the next month while I grapple with RDF, RDFS, OWL and SWRL - I will be contrasting these approaches with our earlier research to see if there is any synergy.
