Saturday, November 22, 2003

SARS, SOTA and the Semantic Web

October's issue of Computer had two interesting articles on the Semantic Web:
Fighting Epidemics in the Information and Knowledge Age "We have simulated the spread of SARS and shown that isolation control measures had no significant effect on containing the epidemic's outbreaks...Information and knowledge sharing profoundly influenced the extent and duration of the SARS epidemic. At first, lack of information and knowledge sharing hampered China's efforts to research the virus and control the epidemic. SARS appeared initially in Guangdong province, but during the outbreak's early stages, the obtained experience with controlling and curing the disease was not available to health workers in other affected regions...Currently, however, the Web cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of the data it holds. To overcome these limitations, scientists are exploring ways to reshape the Web. The Semantic Web and the Grid represent just two of these efforts."

I'm not sure why I liked this article so much. Is it the old man vs microbe battle? Is it the positive reaction and can-do attitude about these problems.

Ontology-Mediated Integration of Intranet Web Services "Dealing with this flood of options will require sweeping automation. To meet this challenge, the authors built their smart office task automation framework—SOTA—using Web services, an ontology, and agent components."

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