Blog - Semantic Arts

How can I ensure that an ontology is easy to understand and use?

by Dave McComb | Nov 6, 2012 | The Whiteboard

This is a complex and multi-faceted issue. The answer depends on the audience, who have varying degrees of a) knowledge in the domain, b) technical background, c) awareness of what the ontology is for and d) need to directly work with the ontology. For everyone, and...

I’m trying to build an enterprise ontology for my organization. How can I avoid terminology wars?

by Dave McComb | Nov 1, 2012 | Knowledge Graphs & Ontologies

Great question. This is an ongoing challenge because different parts of a company use terms differently. One rule of thumb is to avoid using terms that have many different meanings across the company – this will just cause confusion. Things can be set up so that local...

How do I track down and debug errors in my ontology?

by Dave McComb | Oct 31, 2012 | The Whiteboard

I will answer this in the context of OWL ontologies where the errors are found using Hermit or Fact++ as the inference engine. I happen to use Protégé, but other ontology tools have similar functionality. There are a few cases. First, if the ontology is inconsistent,...

Are There Any Tools to Help Find Common Pitfalls in Ontologies?

by Dave McComb | Oct 29, 2012 | The Whiteboard

Yes. Check out http://oeg-lia3.dia.fi.upm.es/oops/. The authors looked through the literature and discovered 29 common pitfalls that arise when building ontologies. Code has been written to automatically find 21 of the 29 pitfalls. Try it out and give the authors...

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

by Dave McComb | Aug 2, 2012 | 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 | Jul 7, 2012 | gist & Open Standards

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

by Dave McComb | Jun 22, 2012 | 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...

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

by Dave McComb | Jun 8, 2012 | 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...

What is the real difference between “on premise” systems and SaaS?

by Dave McComb | May 18, 2012 | The Whiteboard

They can be the same software. That isn’t the essential difference. There are many exceptions and edge cases but the central difference in moving from on premise to SaaS is that you are moving from a large capital budget item that takes a long time to approve to...

What is the pragmatic difference between a public cloud and a private cloud?

by Dave McComb | May 17, 2012 | Graph & Platform Strategy

It mostly depends on whether you are the cloudor or the cloudee. If you are consuming cloud services theoretically there isn’t much difference, but practically there is. You will likely be paying more for a private cloud (not so much because it is inherently...