Entities and Relationships

During the last decade, the emphasis has been on finding relevant documents or content, an objective which most of today's search and browsing techniques address. We believe during the next decade, the emphasis will shift from documents and entities to relationships-that of discovering or validating contextually relevant, meaningful and possibly complex relationships amongst the entities that documents mention and describe. This also is likely to be the next area of focus for the Semantic Web community after it makes progress in addressing the current areas of emphasis on ontology representation, semantic metadata extraction for automatic annotation, query processing and inferencing. Relationships are fundamental to semantics-they associate meanings to words, terms and entities. Semantic Web intends to associate annotations (i.e., metadata) with all Web-accessible resources such that programs can associate 'meaning with data' to interpret them, and to process (access, invoke, utilize, and analyze) them automatically, resulting in higher scalability and better productivity. -- Source

The Semantic Web is Critcal for Managing Information

We no longer describ opject using records but rather using entities and the relationships between those entities. I'm working on learning the elements of the following ontologies and how to use them to organize information using RDFa.

• Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) provides terms for describing people and their social network
• SIOC Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
• DOAP Description of a Project
• Dublin Core Defines general metadata attributes.
• SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System
• SKOS DataZone list of vocabularies available in SKOS schema
• Review Vocabulary provides terms for representing reviews.
• GoodRelations provides terms for describing products and business entities.
• Music Ontology provides terms for describing artists, albums, tracks, but also performances, arrangements, etc.
• Organization Ontology for describing the structure of organizations.
• Linking Open Description of Events (LODE) provides terms for describing the basic properties of an event and contains a list of axioms expressing mapping relationships with other ontologies such as DOLCE, CYC, CIDOC-CRM, Event Ontology, F, and SEM.
• Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed on vocabularies for publishing strucutred data on the Web. Their shared 'ontology' is maintained on schema.org.
• MarineTLO (core) Ontology is a top-level ontology for the marine domain (also applicable to the terrestrial domain) and MarineTLO (imarine) Ontology is an extension and operational version of the MarineTLO core.

While the above is not a definitive list it is a good start. All of use need to be on the lookout for relevant vocabularies