A new article out of AI³ discusses the need for so-called “gold standards” in the semantic web and examines several possible gold standards. As the article puts it, “The types of gold standards useful to the semantic Web are similar to those useful to our analogy of human languages. We need guidance on structure (syntax and grammar), plus reference vocabularies that encompass the scope of the semantic Web (that is, everything).”

The gold standards that the author, Mike Bergman suggests are RDF, RDFS and OWL (building blocks for languages); Wikipedia (a “standard reference vocabulary of things, concepts, and entities”); WordNet (“lexical language references as an aid to natural language processing”); and UMBEL (“the structural reference for the connectedness of things”). The article goes on to discuss each potential gold standard in detail.

The article insists, “The need for gold standards for the semantic Web is particularly acute. First, by definition, the scope of the semantic Web is all things and all concepts and all entities. Second, because it embraces human knowledge, it also embraces all human languages with the nuances and varieties thereof.”

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