February 24, 2011 – We have all felt the anxiety behind ordering the appropriate wine with your meal. The waiter looks on impatiently as you struggle mentally with what sounds good to drink versus what fits into the “red meat/red wine and white meat/white wine” limited wine knowledge bank you possess. Never fear, semantic web technology is here to rescue you from embarrassment.
We found this interesting piece of news on EurekAlert in their article, ‘A semantic sommelier: Wine application highlights the power of Web 3.0.” One lone web scientist has been developing a family of applications for the most tech-savvy wine connoisseurs since long before the World Wide Web had even been envisioned. Deborah McGuinness is among the world’s foremost experts in Web ontology languages that are used to encode meanings in a language that computers can understand. This recent version of her wine application serves as an example of what the future of Web 3.0, might look like. It also serves as a teaching tool for future Web scientists about ontologies.
Using semantic technology, the sommelier application is input with basic background knowledge about wine and food. The semantic technologies beneath the application then encode that knowledge and apply reasoning to search and share that information.
I like the idea of semantic technology enhancing my culinary experience.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
