During the early days of the Internet in the mid and late 90’s software professionals and Internet users waited in angst for computers to become as smart as people by using artificial intelligence (computers using human reason combined with processing power thousands of times faster than human brain’s processing power). This never panned out because the artificial intelligence community could never produce computer software that would reason just as people do. I believe they are still trying…

Surprisingly, for the first time, a field that has been criticized for having never provided any answers and constantly has just added more questions, philosophy (one of my greatest interests), has actually provided a great tool to help make computers a little smarter: Ontologies.

In philosophy, ontological study aims to explain the nature of things that exist. In simple terms it asks what really something is. Describing things will be an important part of how everything will be treated in the future of the Internet where organizations will describe the domains within which they are working, combine this knowledge with shared ontologies of other organizations and apply “reasoner” technology to the combined ontologies to deduce even more information, effectively making one plus one equal to four or five in terms of the amount of useful data.

In an upcoming blog post I will focus on how the reasoner technologies work and how they perform the actual reasoning. For now let’s be satisfied with knowing that reasoners simply add extra knowledge to existing knowledge bases using different logical theories. I will also answer a question you may be already asking yourself: “why couldn’t the artificial intelligence community use the same reasoning as well?”