Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist

CHAPTER 14 Conclusions

For those readers who are accustomed to various sorts of knowledge modeling, the Semantic Web looks familiar. The notions of classes, subclasses, properties, and instances have been the mainstay of knowledge modeling and object systems modeling for decades. It is not uncommon to hear a veteran of one of these technologies look at the Semantic Web and mutter, “Same old, same old,” indicating that there is nothing new going on here and that everything in the Semantic Web has already been done under some other name elsewhere.

As the old saying goes, “There is nothing new under the sun,” and to the extent that the saying is correct, so are these folks when they speak of the Semantic Web. The modeling structures we have examined ...