Features - Future¶
Ontomatica anticipates that USDA, in the future, will want to use the following technologies. Ontomatica’s platform uses these technologies and will make them available to USDA at the appropriate time.
Linked Data¶
Linked Data is a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs. Rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, Linked Data extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. Linking enables data from different sources to be connected and queried. Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, coined the term in a design note discussing issues around the Semantic Web project. For more information see: :cite:`5001` :cite:`5002` :cite:`5003` :cite:`5004`.
Read more on this page designed for USDA:
SPARQL¶
SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) retrieves and manipulates data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. Like a database query language, SPARQL provides analytic operations such as JOIN, SORT, and AGGREGATE. Schema information (the ontology) is external to the RDF format to allow different data-sets to be joined in an unambiguous manner. For more information see: :cite:`4014` :cite:`5061`.
See SPARQL examples on this page:
Reasoning and Reasoners¶
Reasoning software programs (Reasoners) infer logical consequences from set of facts. Logical consequence (a.k.a. entailment) is the relationship between statements that hold true when one logically “follows from” another. A valid logical argument is one where conclusions follow from its premises, and its conclusions are consequences of its premises. Ontomatica uses Reasoners to verify that an electronic food label is consistent with a food labeling ontology and that ingredients in a food label are consistent with food identity (as asserted by the electronic food label). For more information see: :cite:`5048`.
Read more on this page designed for USDA:
To illustrate reasoning, Ontomatica uses a well-known logic puzzle - the Zebra Puzzle (a.k.a. the Einstein Puzzle). The puzzle makes 15 assertions (statements about a certain premise that are accepted as true). Two questions are posed for which answers can be deduced from the assertions. To learn the answer, Ontomatica implemented Zebra Puzzle in an ontology editor (Stanford University’s Protege) using the HermiT reasoner. The answer is shown on the page above. For more information see: :cite:`5050` :cite:`5054` :cite:`5055` :cite:`5056` :cite:`5057` :cite:`5058`.