10 Things on the 10th January: SPARQL, Semantics, Ontology, LLMs, Bowie

Here are 10 things that I’ve been reading about or pondering heavily lately:

1. SPARQL Interview Questions: It’s no secret that I am figuring out my life after Spotify and brushing up on my interview skills related to taxonomy and ontology. This useful summary of common SPARQL questions is really helpful.
2. Semantics: Related to my SPARQL-y exploration, this is a thorough explanation of semantics as related to ontology.
3. SHACL: Not to be outdone in the acronym department, the Shapes Constraint Language takes RDF and OWL to the next level by enabling data validation, rather than simply inferencing.
4. Taxonomies: This thought provoking LinkedIn post by Mike Dillinger, PhD postulates that taxonomies are like “trying to connect data with duct tape.” Both the slides and the podcast episode are worth exploring. I am not sure I agree with all of this, but it is a well-considered analysis with relatable examples in the form of a dog taxonomy.
5. Polyhierarchy: In this apt companion piece to the duct tape taxonomy concept is this article by Ahren E. Lehnert about how polyhierarchy can lead to the dissolution of meaning.
6. LLM Hallucination Mitigation: For additional enlightening reading, try A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models which includes an interesting taxonomy.
7. Ontologist + LLM: Kurt Cagle brings us a detailed exploration of The Role of the Ontologist in the Age of LLMs. The good news is that “ChatGPT is surprisingly schema-aware concerning RDF, and schema.org,” but that ontologists are necessary as gardeners, pruning the RDF output of a generative AI assistant “to make the processing declarative and tokenized rather than imperative.”
8. Pinterest Interest Taxonomy: A blast from the recent past (2020) is this excellent summation of the work by Pinterest to create an interest taxonomy using WebProtégé. For a deeper dive, try the Use of OWL and Semantic Web Technologies at Pinterest.
9. DAM News Roundup: A fantastic source for news pertaining to digital asset management and related topics can be found here. I particularly 🩷 these 5 best practices for DAM by Rachel Edwards.
10. Sound & Vision: Check out the blog about the British Library’s sound archive, aptly called Sound and Vision for a proper David Bowie commemoration. Companion piece – Bowie’s own reading list of his 75 favorite books.