DefiningImageAccess/Tool/SEAL
From ImageWeb
| DefiningImageAccess/Tool/SEAL | |
|---|---|
| Link:=http://ontoware.org/projects/seal/}} | |
| Status:=Active}} | |
| JISCTool:=False}} | |
| Focus:=Web portal}} | |
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| [[Uses::{{{Uses}}}]]}} | |
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| Defining Image Access | DefiningImageAccess/RelatedWork |
SEAL semantic portal
It's difficult to quickly fathom what the SEAL semantic portal actually does based on the readily available publications. Clearly, it is a piece of web software that makes extensive use of ontologies in its operations, but looking at the AIFB semantic portal web site it is not immediately obvious what additional benefits are being achieved by this approach.
There is some suggestion that information in the web pages is accessible to software agents, which suggests that this is essentially a web site that publishes both human- and machine-readable information. Contrast this with the SWED/IUGO semantic portal software, which is very much directed toward using semantic web technology to gather together information from diverse sources, which seems to be more in keeping with the general idea of a "portal".
Delving more deeply into the SEAL architecture, I find that the basic idea is based around ontologically organized data (a "knowledge warehouse"), from which content is generated for presentation to the Web. While it has undoubted attractions, this is almost the reverse of our data web approach, which is to start with data that is already available on the web, and to use ontologies to assit in combining this information into one or more loosely integrated composites. Mediation between the formal knowledge warehouse structures and the web facing components is handled by a "deductive, object oriented dartabase system" called Ontobroker.
It may be that, in the future, the SEAL arcitecture is useful for building web sites that use, in part or whole, semantic information gathered by a data web, but at this stage I don't see SEAL helping us to build a data web.
