Does an increasing number of ontology relationships become difficult to manage? What are some guidelines around how many relationships are manageable?

Wednesday, 02 February 2011 13:09

Any increase in complexity means an increased management overhead. We try to make the tools easy to use to keep the process of building and maintaining the model possible. In our domain the ontology is often more of a set of “federated taxonomies” – a series of distinct classes or facets of information with links between them. The semaphore model operates at a human interaction/discovery level – so keeping the relationships to an manageable set is important for the users to gain familiarity with the model. We do not build OWL type structures where unique relationships can be created between any target and source. This model is excellent for machine inference engines where traversing complex interactions is the goal – a different purpose then the semantic enhancement for content management and findability that we provide.