What if you wanted to find documents on the web from before September 11, 2001 that mention Osama Bin Laden? What if you wanted to find the web’s earliest mention of Beck Hansen? You can’t do this on Google, but you can on AltaVista’s advanced search page (Bin Laden, Beck).

Earlier this week I wrote about my frustration with metadata as data about data that may never exist—data that ontology designers merely wish that someone else would create around their fabulous ontologies. Lately I’ve become interested in the more difficult but useful idea of designing ontologies around existing data in order to get more value from that data. In theory, RDF/OWL descriptions of separate, related data collections make it easier to use those collections together; how does…

In a recent posting, I mentioned that I’ve been thinking lately about how some people doing metadata work (in particular, people doing RDF Schema and RDF/OWL ontologies) don’t care much about whether there is any corresponding data to go with their metadata. We all dutifully define metadata as “data about data,” but a lot of metadata out there is not really about any existing, useful data. Dan Connolly called it “ontologies for the sake of ontologies.”

The program for a recent presentation at my daughter’s school footnoted Wikipedia for a few definitions that were supposed to provide background for whatever cultural thing the kids and we were learning about. I thought this was pretty funny, because the point of footnotes is to show that you didn’t just make something up; you got it from a source that the reader can check on to follow up on the information. A source that anyone can edit, that makes the news every week for the many…