Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: The Impact on Scientific Publishing, probably the densest panel I attended today (and again expertly moderated by Science Commons’ John Wilbanks), covered open access, new business models for scientific publishers, and how web technologies can help with these and data problems, but kept coming back to how officious Semantic Web technologies and controlled ontologies (which are not the same at all, but are often lumped together) and microformats and tagging (also distinct) complement each other (all four of ’em!), even within a single application. I agree.
Nearly on point, this comment elsewhere by Denny Vrandecic of the Semantic MediaWiki project:
You are supposed to change the vocabulary in a wiki-way, just as well as the data itself. Need a new relation? Invent it. Figured out it’s wrong? Rename. Want a new category of things? Make it.
Via Danny Ayers, oringal posted to O’Reilly Radar, which doesn’t offer permalinks for comments. This just needs a catchy name. Web 2.0 ontology engineering? Fonktology?
Actually, we have a whole workshop devoted to that topic at the WWW in Banff, called the CKC 2007 Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge, find here more.
http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/ckc2007
Heh- I was at this talk too. I forget who said it, but the idea that the semantics of “This person is the auhor of such and such article” can be managed by the publishers, and the semantics of “this gene expresses this condition” can be managed by researchers was interesting. Instead of one huge ontology for the whole shebang, the different groups (researchers and publishers) can focus on the semantics of what they individually are good at. Seems more do-able than One Big Scientific Research Ontology.