Saturday, November 8, 2008

It's All About The Inferencing

Continuing my reading of the Ontology book and playing around with the Jena toolkit - I'm finally getting it. By that I mean that I'm beginning to see semantic web modeling as being about describing the inferences that can be made, rather than the structure.

The RDFS subClassOf relationship is about indicating the class membership inferences that can be made and is not a statement of class structure in the OOP sense.

So, RDFS and OWL are really just sets of fixed resources and predicates that are used in the patterns matched by a fixed set of inference rules. At least, that is my current understanding. It would really interesting if there was a standard way of introducing new inference rules.

There is SWRL (which is implemented by a number of toolkits) and the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group at the W3C - but as of now, nothing standard. :(

No comments: