Ontology and Semantics: new trappings for an old Web
Ontologies are likely to play a crucial role on in people's lives. Originally a philosophical term to describe the nature meaning a systematic or simplified abstract description of existence, ontology is used by web researchers to name documents or files in a manner that formally defines the relationships among terms. A typical kind of ontology on the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules, meaning that pertinent objects, tasks or applications are conceptualised and communicated among application systems directly. For instance, if someone is in need of immediate medical assistance late at night and with the help of an ontological search engine, the computer instantly retrieves the exact location of an emergency hospital within short distance from his or her home. Or the same search engine could extract the name of the appropriate doctor or surgeon and then finds a match between available times the doctor can be consulted. Ontologies have the power to distil information. They assist software agents in collecting, comparing or combining information i.e. addresses, locations, postal codes and data on people across two or more databases without any lengthy lists of hits. Through these databases, the agents point to different definitions of the same item via the use of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) language services. These tools target the search in ways that are useful and meaningful to the user. This literally means that web users may in the future not only read information on the web but also really order the computer to retrieve the information on the location of the closest emergency hospital or the name of the doctor or surgeon they will be scheduling an appointment with. The developers believe that their technology could possibly provide savings in time and money to an estimated 40-70%. Faced with the danger of information obstacles that the lack of standardisation creates, ontologies may reduce the volume overload by offering semi-automatic access to plug-and-play software directly from the Web. While the true semantic web technology is too premature to be useful, its promising potential for the future is attracting not only governments but huge company interests as well.
