Meaning and Links: Some Theory and Some Practice

Abstract

I've been thinking for some time about disciplines for making relational networks and similar structures both more rigorous and more powerful. My paper, "What's in a Link" was one effort in this direction, and my "Understanding Subsumption and Taxonomy" paper was another. Today, it's amazing to see these issues emerging as important problems in the corporate world, as people try to move to new levels of business modeling, using ontologies and taxonomies together with web technologies like XML, RDF, UML, and OWL to model business objects, business environments, and general world knowledge.

Understanding the subtle issues of meaning and representation in relational networks, both for accuracy of modeling and for scalable performance has been one of my goals in an ongoing effort, with much still to be worked out. In this talk, I'd like to share with you some of the insights I have been able to puzzle out so far and one of the practical applications to which they have been put. I will also discuss some of the problems that remain to be solved.