Matters

XML.com: The Semantic Web is Closer Than You Think: "Two quick points are worth making here. First, we all spend some amount of our brain power -- almost entirely without consciously knowing that this is what we are doing -- dealing with informal, implicit ontologies. In order to act meaningfully at all within particular social contexts, we need to have understood something roughly like an ontology of that context. In any situation or context there will be features which we attend to, because they just are the salient features of that context, and an even larger number of things about the situation which we do not attend to, which we cannot even call features, because they are the background noise against which salience emerges. The homo sapiens form of the mammalian brain is very good at doing this. It's so good, in fact, that it has figured out how to get computers to do something (very) roughly like this, too."