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Writing on knowledge graphs, ontologies, and data-centric architecture

Articles and working notes from the people at Semantic Arts, newest first.

Topics: All articles · Knowledge graphs and ontologies · Data-centric architecture · Business case and ROI · gist and open standards · AI-ready data · The Whiteboard · News and community

Quantities, Number Units and Counting in gist

by Michael Uschold | gist & Open Standards

First: This is Not About Apartment or Building Unit Numbers Looking for apartment or building unit numbers? This isn’t that. This page is about how units of measurement—kilograms, currencies, time intervals—are modelled in enterprise data systems. If that is what […]

Collections and Queries: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

This blog is wholly inspired by an observation made by Dave McComb that collections and queries have an interesting relationship. Collections frequently arise when creating enterprise ontologies. In manufacturing, there are lists of approved suppliers and lists of ingredients. In […]

Degeneracy, Pot and Freebasing

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

In 2013 marijuana became legal in Colorado and Washington. It did not escape the notice of our clients that all Semantic Arts staff are from those two states. Suspicions grew deeper when we told them about the large collaborative knowledge […]

White Paper: The Distinctionary

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Encyclopedias are generally not intended to help with definition. An encyclopedia is useful in that once you know what something means, you can find out what else is known about it. Semantics is predicated on the idea of good definitions. […]

White Paper: Semantic Profiling

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Semantic profiling is a technique using semantic-based tools and ontologies in order to gain a deeper understanding of the information being stored and manipulated in an existing system. In this paper we will describe an approach to understanding the data […]

Fractal Data Modeling

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Fractal geometry creates beautiful patterns from simple recursive algorithms. One of the things we find so appealing is their “self-similarity” at different scales. That is, as you zoom in to look at a detail under more magnification you see many […]

Groans, Giggles and Gales of Laughter

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

As the Season to be Jolly gets into full swing, I reflect one of my favorite ways to be jolly: laughter. What makes us laugh (or not) in a given situation? Some people just laugh, like my mother, who regularly […]

Is the Road to Euphoria Paved by Thanking with Reckless Abandon?

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

I wrote the following last year, and am inspired to share this more publicly, today, the Monday of Thanksgiving week, 2014. It is Thanksgiving Day, 2013 and I just came across an article describing how science has tied gratitude to […]

SPARQL: Changing Instance URIs

by Michael Uschold | The Whiteboard

In a prior blog (SPARQL: Updating the URI of an owl:Class in place) we looked into how to use SPARQL to rename a class in a triple store. The main steps are below. We showed how to do this for […]

SPARQL: Updating the URI of an owl:Class in place

by Michael Uschold | The Whiteboard

Background We have been developing solutions for our clients lately that involve loading an ontology into a triple store, and building a UI for data entry. One of the challenges is how to handle renaming things. If you want to […]

Why Not to Use Boolean Datatypes in Taxonomies

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Many taxonomies, especially well designed taxonomies with many facets, have dimensions that consist of very few, often just two categories, however this may cause more harm than it’s worth. It is tempting to give these Boolean like tags, such as […]

The Data-Centric Revolution: Data-Driven Resolution Planning

by Dave McComb | Data-Centric Architecture

Perhaps the way to be ready for resolution is to flip from document-centric to data-centric. Build a system that expresses in real time, the on-going agreements between the many legal entities within the firm. Capture who is doing what for […]

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