Skip to main content

Ontologies for matching

I have previously wondered out loud what ontologies are good for. I now believe that one of the most powerful use cases for semantic technology lies in social networking applications; and matching in general.

By social networking I mean "putting people in touch with each other"; especially in situations that are inherently asymmetric. For example, putting potential volunteers in touch with people who could use their services; putting buyers in touch with sellers, and so on.

The reason is simple: the language spoken by the two sides is inherently different: a seller or volunteer knows a lot (or maybe not) about what he or she can do or would like to do. But a consumer often does not know to translate his or her problem into a solution that the provider can offer.

Put more graphically, providers speak features, and consumers speak problems. This is even if they can find each other.

In the middle, there is an opportunity for someone to put the two together. A match maker has to be able to put the right provider in touch with the right consumer; in a sense that is the measure of the quality of the match maker.

The more that a match maker knows about the domain, the range of things being offered and consumed, the easier it is for the match maker to do a good job.

Enter the Ontology: in a modern social networking application, the domain knowledge of the match maker can be encoded and used as the underlying basis for performing matches.

This is, in my view, a killer application for semantic web technology.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Concept Oriented Markup

I have long been frustrated with all the different text mark up languages and word processors that I have used. There are many reasons for this; but the biggest issue is that markups (including very powerful ones like TeX) are not targeted at the kind of stuff I write.

Nowadays, it seems archaic to still be thinking in terms of sections and chapters. The world is linked and that applies to the kind of technical writing that I do.

I believe that the issue is fundamental. A concept like "section" is inherently about the structure of a document. But, what I want to focus on are concepts like "example", "definition", and "function type".

A second problem is that, in a complex environment, the range of documentation that is available to an individual reader is actually composed of multiple sources. Javadoc exemplifies this: an individual library may be documented using Javadoc into a single HTML tree. However, most programmers require access to multiple…
Read more

Robotic Wisdom

It seems to me that one of the basic questions that haunt AI researchers is 'what have we missed?' Assuming that the goal of AI is to create intelligence with similar performance to natural intelligence; what are the key ingredients to such a capability?

There is an old saw
It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill
There is a lot of truth to that; it effectively amounts to 10 years of more-or-less full-time focus. This has been demonstrated for many fields of activity from learning an instrument, learning a language or learning to program.

But it does not take 10,000 hours to figure out if it is raining outside, and to decide to carry an umbrella. What is the difference?

One informal way of distinguishing the two forms of learning is to categorize one as `muscle memory' and the other as 'declarative memory'. Typically, skills take a lot of practice to acquire, whereas declarative learning is instant. Skills are more permanent too: you tend not to forget a skill; but it is…
Read more

Existential Types are the flip side of generics

Generic types, as can now be seen in all the major programming languages have a flip side that has yet to be widely appreciated: existential types.

Variables whose types are generic may not be modified within a generic function (or class): they can be kept in variables, they can be passed to other functions (provided they too have been supplied to the generic function), but other than that they are opaque. Again, when a generic function (or class) is used, then the actual type binding for the generic must be provided – although that type may also be generic, in which case the enclosing entity must also be generic.

Existential types are often motivated by modules. A module can be seen to be equivalent to a record with its included functions: except that modules also typically encapsulate types too. Abstract data types are a closely related topic that also naturally connect to existential types (there is an old but still very relevant and readable article on the topic Abstract types have …
Read more