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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

Ontology Questions and Answers

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

Contents: I’m trying to build an enterprise ontology for my organization. How can I avoid terminology wars? How can I ensure that an ontology is easy to understand and use? How can I ensure that an ontology is complete? How […]

Oh brave new world… How semantic technology can improve your IT productivity while protecting your legacy IT investments

by Dave McComb | Business Case & ROI

Workers, professionals, and managers are all becoming acutely aware of the discrepancy between the performance of consumer based technology and their internal IT department. The gap between the information and services they can get for ‘free’ on the web vs. […]

What is gist, and what does it stand for?

by Dave McComb | gist & Open Standards

gist doesn’t stand for anything. It’s an ordinary word meaning “a general understanding,” which is exactly what the ontology provides: a small set of concepts general enough to underpin almost any business application. gist is Semantic Arts’ minimalist upper ontology […]

Semantic technology – the path to becoming more perceptive, intelligent and collaborative

by Dave McComb | Business Case & ROI

Semantic technologies will create incremental value by making us more perceptive, intelligent and collaborative learners. The knowledge modeling capabilities of semantic technology will encourage us to create abstract models of our ideas, run simulations to evaluate and improve them and […]

Effectiveness, efficiency and strategic advantage – the promise of semantic technology

by Dave McComb | Business Case & ROI

Semantic technology makes us more effective, efficient and strategic. Effectiveness. A system that can easily be modeled to reflect the way you think or the processes you manage, increases your effectiveness. You can solve problems faster because you can quickly apply your […]

Introducing Shades Of Gray Into The Black And White World Of Data Modeling

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

The world of traditional information technology is black or white. If something isn’t the same, then it is different. Every new distinction requires the creation of a new table. This creates a problem because once a new table is created […]

Semantic Power Tools—Inference and Composition

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

Inference is one of the ways that semantic technology simplifies information systems. Many of the manual assertions that must be made in the traditional systems can happen automatically in a semantic model. The more things you can infer, the fewer […]

Reuse – Creating Sustainable Models

by Dave McComb | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Since the semantic model is free of structure, it is easier to map concepts to different structural representations enabling reuse of classes and properties. Reuse is a profound way to reduce complexity. In a traditional system, attributes are not reused. […]

Semantic Technology – Modeling The Real World

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

Semantic technology uses ontologies to describe the business in a way that both humans and machines can understand. Since the semantic schema is independent from actual computer systems, e.g., legacy or future applications and databases, it allows us to find […]

An Information System Fairy Tale

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

By Dave McComb [The names have been changed to protect somebody.] Once upon a time there was a firm. The firm had many, many employees and of course had payroll and personnel systems. One day the firm was visited by […]

Headless Apps

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

In brief: A headless app is an application built as business logic (validation and side effects) behind an API, with no user interface of its own beyond a simple test scaffold. User interface developers then build as many interfaces on […]

Why are scanners so slow?

by Dave McComb | The Whiteboard

Last week over lunch, my 18-year-old son Eli asked me, “Why are scanners so slow? They don’t even have as much to do as a copy machine. The copy machine has to move paper, put ink on the page. The […]

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