The world of Ontologies

There are books and mainly papers to read when studying advanced topics, but some light reading material helps much more to get started. That is where you turn to one of the most fascinating projects of the internet; Wikipedia. Often described as an unreliable source yet perfect for context, it is the goto place for all kinds of topics. The design of it is quite genius, but I want to dive a bit deeper into a whole other layer that Wikipedia offers.

Or should I say WikiData, as that is what this is about. It is one of the many projects that start with Wiki- in the name, and it is the knowledge backbone for the structured data. So what is structured data, not those pesky XML documents right? There is a whole area of internet technologies that I was not aware of called Semantic Web Technologies. And it is possible to serialize them to XML, as OWL/XML or RDF/XML. This is not going to be a full explanation of what it all means, as it is much more fun to go through this learning process yourself if you never heard about it.

To me it meant learning about all kinds of technologies that power projects that do stuff that you would not believe a computer could reliably do. Like if someone would tell you, you would think it would be some specific software, but as it turns out it has been generalized and standardized to a high level; W3C high. Make your own little ontology and connect it to the rest of the internet and by logic make it behave like a magic answering machine, all fully transparent and extendable. Stretching the line of extendability to the point you ask what you have been doing wrong with data projects in the past. So much handrolling of this parsing and interpreting of data, when you could have used the shiny ontology and improve someone elses dataset instead. Because your data probably sucks, and the code that you operate it with even more so.