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Semantics: Revolutionary Breakthrough or Just Another Way of Doing Things?

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Abstract

It sometimes feels like an uphill battle to explain why an organization should embrace semantic technology rather than continue to rely on relational databases and application programming in object-oriented languages. In this chapter, we review the formal foundations of various representations, and evaluate them against five criteria: understandability of the models, availability of information for retrieval, ability to infer new information which is provably correct, interoperability, and the ability of the data to speak to minds and machines alike with a shared semantics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ACID is an acronym for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, a set of properties that guarantee that database transactions are processed reliably. Some of the challengers to relational technology have emerged from applications such as social media where performance and scalability have at least initially seemed more important than transactional integrity.

  2. 2.

    Minds and Machines is the name of a journal associated with the Society for Machines and Mentality. It is the name of an MIT OpenCourseware offering. It is also the name of an annual GE-sponsored event (see https://www.gemindsandmachines.com/).

  3. 3.

    But beware, we are not the first scientific epoch to view the working of the human mind as an extension of current technology. In a time when fluid dynamics was the newest thing, there were elaborate theories of how the brain worked based on fluid flows (Wade and Swanston 1991).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GE Global Research, K1 3A26, 1 Research Circle, 12309, Niskayuna, NY, USA

    Andrew W. Crapo PhD & Steven Gustafson PhD

Authors
  1. Andrew W. Crapo PhD
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  2. Steven Gustafson PhD
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Correspondence to Andrew W. Crapo PhD .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Research and Development, Security Policy Institute, Melbourne, Florida, USA

    Michael Workman

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Crapo, A., Gustafson, S. (2016). Semantics: Revolutionary Breakthrough or Just Another Way of Doing Things?. In: Workman, M. (eds) Semantic Web. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16658-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16658-2_5

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