[Tutor] Python and Semantic Web

[Matt Williams]

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa (or, MCMCMMC to repeat my sin of
poly-acronymony.

Semantic Web - (loosely) the idea of incorporating semantic information
in the WWW, so it becomes machine understandable (rather than just
parsable).

CWM is Tim Berners-Lee's (and others) tool to handle ontologies. I think
it has some rules in-built, but for reasons of efficiency, most ontology
tools communicte with external Description Logic Reasoners via the DIG
(Desc. Logic Implementation Group) interface, which is http/XML based.

Much of the semweb stuff is OWL (Web Ontology Language - need to be a
Winnie The Pooh fan to get the acronym) based. OWL is a layer that lies
on top of RDF (which in turn, lies on top of XML). In general, yu build
an ontology in OWL, and then interface with a reasoner to infer more
info. about the model.

The two big ontology building tools are Protege (with the Protege OWL
plugin) and SWOOP, but both are Java based.

HTH.
Matt


-- 
Dr. M. Williams MRCP(UK)
Clinical Research Fellow
Cancer Research UK
+44 (0)207 269 2953
+44 (0)7834 899570
http://acl.icnet.uk/~mw
http://adhominem.blogspot.com