Semantic Research: Knowlege Organization

My lab had the opportunity to meet with the folks over at SemanticResearch. Overall, definitely a very intriguing company. But first things first: their offices are located IN the MTv Real World San Diego house, which as some of you might know – is awesome! I really don’t know how they get any work done in such a great view of the harbor.

You may be here to read about the company, but I think you’re probably more interested in hearing about what they (and other companies like them) do. In its simplest form, you create a web, a network, between nodes (typically a noun) by defining certain pre-determined relationships between them (verb). By combining many nodes and their relationships you create something akin to a web. Its usefulness is seen when you find links between two unrelated nodes.

Here’s a brief example, of which I’ll use the following notation:
[node1]---(relationship)---[node2]

[John]---(friend of)---[Mike]
[Mike]---(friend of)---[Anthony]
[Anthony]---(owns)---[beach house]
[beach house]---(has address)---[123 Prospect, La Jolla]
[John]--(owns)---[condo]
[condo]---(has address)---[456 Pearl., La Jolla]
So what’s the relationship between these two seemingly unrelated homes in La Jolla? Ok – it’s pretty easy to see in this example, but imagine a social network with 5,000 nodes where you’re trying to determine the relationships between two individuals.

We definitely look forward to working more with SemanticResearch on incorporating some of their ideas into the DFL. We’ll have 800-100 fish, with several different habitats, and several other defined relationships (e.g., predator/prey, host/parasite, etc).