Thursday, August 7, 2008

Semantic Research - RDF, RDFS, OWL

I still have much to learn in the world of semantic standards. However I have begun the construction of an ontology for genealogy. The ontology I am building will relate basic family ancestry to geographical information and historical events.

Anyone interested in this work please feel free to contact me on the WebDirection site - see the link on the left.

I am starting with a conventional ER model of the data. This will provide me a structured view of the data and enable some basic prototyping to ensure the approach is robust and consistent. Next I will build a context model for the information, and finally a standards based ontology.

In my research I have come across a number of semantic wiki tools these look interesting and I may include one of them on the webdirection.ca site.

As yet I am skeptical of the standards based approach.

I had an e-mail conversation with Mike Mohammed earlier this week - Mike is of the opinion that managing the relationships is the most challenging part of modeling and that a tool to do this would be a significant step forwards. I will be giving this some serious thought over the next couple of weeks.

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