Friday, 1:45pm, Grand Salon A
Information architects have been singing the praises of metadata, thesauri and controlled vocabularies for years. We understand the power that words have, and the importance of the relationships between concepts. We live in a world of broader and narrower, preferred and variant terms. Structured information makes us smile. Faceted navigation brightens our day.
But there is a new game in town: the Semantic Web. This isn’t the mythical Semantic Web of 10 years ago. This one has moved out of the realm of theory and is making impact on the business world today. Semantic search, ontology, knowledge base, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, triples; these are all terms you may have heard over the last couple of months, as the Semantic Web is becoming more of a reality.
This session will answer the questions “What exactly *is* the Semantic Web? And why should I care?” We’ll discuss how ontologies are similar and different from thesauri and taxonomies. We’ll look at examples of how this technology is being used in the marketplace. We’ll talk about how these concepts can be incorporated into the information architecture work that you are doing today. And where you can go to learn more.
The technology companies and database and data warehousing geeks are the ones that currently are leading the Semantic Web. As information architects we need to understand the Semantic Web, so we can help shape what the world of Web 3.0 will be.
INSTRUCTOR
Chiara Fox
Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. Chiara has developed successful information architectures for all types of web properties, large and small. She has presented at conferences and taught workshops on information architecture to audiences around the world. Past clients include CNN.com, Cityseach, Dice.com, UCSF Medical Center, Target, SecondLife and Business Objects.
Before joining Adaptive Path, Chiara served as the senior information architect for PeopleSoft.com, and was an information architect at Argus Associates. Because of her background as a librarian, Chiara specializes in content analysis, metadata and taxonomy development, search and building architectures from the bottom up. Chiara can be reached at: chiara [at] adaptivepath [dot] com.