The Work Ontology

Excerpt from Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web"

"I've mentioned the personal ontology often enough that you should now have a pretty good idea what it is. It specifies all your complicated tastes, requirements, constraints, beliefs, and desires as it learns about you by watching you go about your day. Because people wear many different hats, you'll build several ontologies. You'll have one for all your different roles - as a worker, a volunteer, a parent, a skydiver, etc.

You'll probably share ontologies with various groups of coworkers. Your semantic dashboard has different contexts, so as you enter each facet of your dashboard, it knows which ontology to use.

Suppose you own a factory that makes concrete bricks. If your company's ontology knows about all the assets and processes, then you can play what-if using the ontology as a modeling tool.

You can say, "What would it take to add another production line versus building a separate plant in another location?" and it will automatically go online, hook up to several brick-making ontologies, look up transportation costs from current tables, bring in the costing and estimating applications, search for everything necessary, cost out the machinery, installation, and additions to your infrastructure, and show you various scenarios.

You'll make changes to the overall picture by saying you want more bricks per hour, you have clients farther away; you want larger production runs, or you need to start making more cinder blocks. The ontology will handle all the details, from sourcing components to costing out custom molds to estimating how much space you'll need for curing and storage, etc.

In the spirit of the semantic web, you'll get work done by asking questions rather than assembling parts by hand."


Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business (2009)
by David Siegel