I just stumbled across a post titled: Why Reasoning Matters: Consistency
Checking from Clark and Parsia
As you can see from my recent post about how we've started the
process of inoculating DBpedia against the potential
dangers of "contextual incoherence", we are entering a newer
era in the Semantic Web's evolution. My post and the one
from Clark & Parsia both touch different aspects of the
"Data Dictionary"
for the Semantic Web issue.
Note: in my universe of discourse, a Data Dictionary manifests
when the constraints and class hierarchies defined in an ontology
(e.g. a web accessible
shared ontology) are functionally bound to a data manager.
Interestingly the binding can take the following forms:
- Engine Hosted - which is what you get with Virtuoso's in-built Inference Engine
- External - which is what you get when the Inference Engine is a
distinct component from the data manager (example: Owlgres
which can sit in front of 3rd party SPARQL endpoints via ARQ)
The classification terminology I use above is very much
off-the-cuff, its sole purpose is architectural distinction.
Anyway, it's really nice to see that we are entering an era re.
the Semantic
Web vision, where the virtues of reasoning are getting simpler
to demonstrate and articulate.
In a nutshell, the point-point data integration era is coming to
an end! The era of intelligent ontology based enterprise data
integration is nigh!
Of course, there is much more to come on the practical utility
front, so stay tuned as we work our way through the DBpedia inoculation program.