Text Mining and Ontologies

A brief update. I’m privileged to have been invited to a meeting at Dagstuhl in Germany. It’s on Text Mining and Ontologies (I expect that we shall all post abstracts over the next few days). It’s a heavyish program and – rightly – wireless is forbidden in the seminar room so there won’t be many posts. I’m applying Chatham House rule although you can see the participants on the web.
The discussion today included

  •  whether ontologies modelled reality
  • can we create ontologies from text-mining (general answer no, except in limited cases, but it may be a useful help)
  • whether ontologies should always be created by domain experts (generally yes – any contracted-out ontology is garbage).

I presented our group’s work today – OSCAR is now well known and being used elsewhere. It’s nice to be in an area where software and resources are freely available. My optimism level about free knowledge in science has risen.
Also some useful unattributed conversations about repositories – the computer scientists are not impressed with DSpace etc. and the resources spent by universities. I’m gathering ideas for my presentation at OR08 next week on Data Repositories. I am gearing up to generate lively discussion.

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