Saturday, March 14, 2009

Linked Data - new paradigm of Information Management

I work in 'Professional Services' Industry. Out here Information is 'vital' and making structural inferences out of disorganized information is 'Money' ($$). In my current organization, we have information stored in multiple data sources such as warehouse, wikis, blogs, document management systems, lotus notes based collaboration systems etc. The key challenge we are facing is how to find information ranked by relevance. How to link data from different sources to make meaningful inferences?

I heard Sir Tim Berners Lee, outlining the concept of Linked Data, and was greatly moved by it. Can Semantic web bring about the next revolution in the way we see, perceive and interpret data? Let's find out..

Try out the following steps.
1. Check out the Ontology viewer on Yago (a semantic knowledge base developed by Max-Plank Institute, Saarbrucken). NOTE - This would require Java applet enabled on your viewer
2. You should see an entity 'India' and it's relationships with other entities.
3. Click on other entities and browse through the semantic web (of course limited to the 2 million entities that Yago has put up so far)..

Hope this primer gets you initiated on Semantic web..more to follow on future posts.

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