“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” –Picasso
If everything is explicitly described in uniform, robust and comprehensive data models, it is easy to imagine how to ask questions of the data. The social, technical and financial costs of getting the information into that state, however, will keep that from ever being a reality. So, how can we integrate and reason over choppy and sloppy data from multiple sources in a variety of formats? We will see how the RDFS and Web Ontology Language (OWL) W3C standards help us connect and reason over content that leaves things unsaid without writing a bunch of custom code.
This is not artificial intelligence, but it is influenced by work done in that field.
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.