There appears to be an interesting discussion going on around Siri (Apple's iOS assistant which, among other things, is a mediator to web search and local search functions) and it's inability to locate 'abortion clinics'. Danny Sullivan has a long piece on the topic which is worth a read but it concludes, in part, that the system can't find the clinics because the clinics themselves don't self describe as 'abortion clinics'. This highlights one of the challenges of search and local search in particular. There are at least 2 descriptions of the world: the source description (how the business or entity describes itself) and the user or customer description (how users conceive of an organize the world). These are not always the same, and a good search engine will figure that out and mediate between the two partially aligned ontologies.
All up, Apple is going to learn that being in the search business is not as simple as hooking up to a single data provider or even a single services search API.
It reminds me of my favorite Ontology post Clay Shirky's Ontology is overrated. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
The green sociology book example is my favorite.
Posted by: Mabarnes9 | December 02, 2011 at 11:39 AM