The Art of Web Taxonomy

Perhaps building on his ancestral relationship to impressionist painter Henri Matisse, Michael C. Daconta is passionate about the art of Web taxonomy, not just the bits and bytes of its design. Daconta is director of Web and technology services for systems integrator APG McDonal Bradley, Inc. Part of that job puts him in the role of chief architect of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Virtual Knowledge Base, a project to compile a directory of Defense Department data through Extensible Markup Language ontologies. Co-author of the 2003 book "The Semantic Web," Daconta explains that there is a right way and a wrong way to do a taxonomy -- and many current Web designers are going about it the wrong way. The semantic Web, he says, is a web of machine-processable data, unlike the current Web, which is human-readable data. Should the semantic Web become a reality, searches will be more fruitful, and many Internet-based activities that must be user-managed today will be largely automated. "The compelling goals are targetless query and targetless production," he says. "By targetless, I mean that if you want information, you shouldn't have to know where the information resides… The idea is that Virtual Knowledge Base will know where X is stored." (Via Government Computer News)

Posted by Tom on June 03, 2004