Exploitable results Untangling the Web thanks to ontologies Few people outside rarefied academic circles know what ontology means. But not for much longer. An Internet search with Google using the term 'ontology' will generate over 500,000 links. Searching for 'what is an ontology?' will generate some 1,200. In order to extract the information you want, it is necessary to browse, and with these sorts of numbers, that just takes too long. But according to Dr Ying Ding, project manager for Onto Web, change is round the corner. Says Ding: "In the future, when you put a question to the Web, you will actually get an answer. The system will be able to understand the question and give you the right answer you need, not the lengthy list of hits." Ding goes on to explain that this change will occur because of the advent of the Semantic Web, which is crucially underpinned by ontology. Originally an idea used in classical philosophy, ontology has now come to mean "a formalised and explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation of some domain, capturing the meaning of pertinent objects, tasks or applications." Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
