Wiser OWL learns to unravel doctor talk (The University of Manchester)

I saw a really good news bit today, actually two days old but that's how far behind I am on non-critical email:

A good example of the scale of the problem facing medics and computer scientists is the NCI Cancer Thesaurus that has swollen from 20,000 medical terms in 2004 to over 50,000 terms today.

As new terms are being added all the time, ensuring that all these terms are described, updated and linked together correctly is a mammoth task for humans. However, by using OWL 2 definitions can be written in such a way that computer programs can tirelessly update these terms, enriching the structure of the Thesaurus and pointing out where there are errors.
 
"The first stage was writing the NCI Thesaurus in the original version of the language, OWL, but now OWL 2 enables computer programs to interpret these terms in a much more human-like way, for instance reasoning that if a fracture is located on a bone which is part of a leg then that fracture is a fracture of that leg," said Bijan Parsia of the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science.

via www.manchester.ac.uk

I can't write more about it now, but it's a critical step in the right direction for the evolution of the Semantic Web. Some maintain it hasn't even been born yet, much less started to evolve. There's an element of truth in that, but it's a sign of the change in our sense of time that we would expect something as complex as the Semantic Web to  move along more quickly than it has so far. Kudos to the folks at Manchester and Oxford who made this manifest earlier this week.