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Enumerations of domain concepts— and of relationships among the concepts— are referred to as domain ontologies. An ontology provides a domain of discourse that is understandable by both developers and computers, and that can be used to build knowledge bases containing detailed descriptions of particular application areas.
Ontologies represent convenient ways of characterizing a set of concepts and relationships in an application area. They do not, and cannot, capture absolute Platonic truths about what might exist in the world. The merits of a particular ontology can be measured only in terms of how well that ontology supports development of the application programs for which it was designed, and of how easy it is for developers to reuse that ontology to build new applications.
Just as a schema provides the organizing framework for a database, an ontology provides the framework for a domain knowledge base. Although specific ontologies rarely are reusable in toto from one application to the next, they often provide considerable guidance when developers wish to create new systems in the same domain.
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— Mark A. Musen (Ontology -Oriented Design and Programming)
"As a fellow web developer, I have to disagree that this is good for the web. At all. Yes, Facebook’s new toy, er… protocol is kind of semantic. Yes, part of the graph is embedded using standard HTML metadata markup. But all of the data it gathers and analyzes become centralized. Stored in its own databases! How can that be good for the web? The point of the semantic web is to be connected, yes. But to be connected in a certain way: namely, in an open and decentralized way (like RDFa supports). Not closed and centralized and irrecoverable. Since Facebook only got one of three things right, and that thing (connection) is the only thing that matters to the masses, there will be little incentive for everyone to move to another service later that is connected, open and decentralized. So while one third of the “open” graph is useful, the other two aren’t. And I think that if Facebook’s graph becomes the “standard”, apathy will prevent the web from evolving further."
— Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective (via dagoneye)