An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

doctor’s office individually to find out if he or she is taking new patients and if there is a suitable
open appointment. Using existing sources of information, you might get lucky and get an
appointment with the first call, but it could easily take much longer.
The Semantic Web is all about describing things in a manner that computers can understand,
so that you can ask questions like the one in this example and let a digital assistant do the
leg work. Using Semantic Web technology, data can be shared and reused across application,
enterprise, and community boundaries.
ISO 15926 has borrowed two technologies from the Semantic Web, OWL (Web Ontology
Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework). OWL is a language for creating ontologies,
a concept we will discuss next. RDF is a way of storing information in declarations of
truth using specific vocabularies, or ontologies, in a manner that makes the meaning machine
readable.
How We Know and Understand Things
When we go beyond custom-built methods of exchanging information between two particular
computer applications—when we try to design a way for any two computer applications to
exchange information without having to know anything at all about each other—we confront
the question of how we represent knowledge. This is not just sophistry. When two people are
having a conversation, they will naturally ask questions if they do not understand something
or if they receive an unexpected response.
But when software applications exchange information there is no opportunity to ask questions.
The developers of these applications will make certain assumptions about the world,
and therefore key terminology in the applications may differ. The solution is to embed the
necessary context (that is, the understanding that humans bring) into the data being exchanged.
For this, we need to understand how we know things. The study of how we know
things in philosophy and mathematics is called ontology. We do not need an in-depth understanding
of what ontology is in order to understand ISO 15926, but a brief, personal, example
will be helpful.
I, your humble author, ride a bicycle to work most days. (Among other things, it lets me indulge
in the luxury of eating the fine Ukrainian food my wife cooks for me!) The distance to
work makes a nice workout but is beyond walking if the bicycle were to break down. Therefore,
I have developed what you might call an Ontology of Things That Will Carry a Bicycle.
Now, in Western Canada—which to most Europeans is but a few years out of the horse age—
the pickup truck is king. In Western Canada, all “real men” have pickups. As you can see from
Figure 2.2, there is ample room in a pickup truck to carry a bicycle. So, it is not difficult to
imagine that if my bicycle broke down on the way to work, I would try to think of everyone
who owned a pickup truck that might have driven it to work that day.
Fig. 2.2 Pickup truck.
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