A Platform for Semantic Web Studies
to be presented at Web Science 2010
At the very beginning of Watson, there was this idea that not only it should be a gateway to the Semantic Web by providing services for applications to exploit it, but also because it would represent a new platform for us, researchers, to better understand it. Indeed, Watson creates a huge collection of ontologies and indexes it so that processing its content can be done in an efficient way. Therefore, back in 2007, we published a paper at the EON workshop entitled characterizing knowledge on the semantic web with Watson, which presented interesting findings, in particular on the concrete use of semantic technologies at the time.
Following this, I still very often present Watson as two things: the well-known platform for developers allowing them to build next generation Semantic Web applications, and a platform for researchers allowing them to study the Semantic Web. However, in general, not a lot has happened since the EON paper in 2007 concerning this second aspect... in appearance.
In reality, in particular as part of Carlo's PhD, a lot has happened on monitoring and analyzing one very important aspect of ontologies online: their relationships. So here is a whole blog post just to say that we finally decided to write an overview of this work on using Watson as a platform for Semantic Web studies, in a paper for the Web Science 2010 conference. The idea here is to show how Watson can be used as a foundation for such a platform, and to describe some of the studies we have been conducting using it, to answer questions such as "How do ontologies evolve?", "How does a modular ontology typically look like?" and many others.
So, if you happen to be in Raleigh, North Carolina on the 26-27 April 2010 and that's the kind of questions you have been asking yourself, come and talk to me, I might know a way to find the answers.