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.