Many of you might be wondering what the concept of Ontologies has got to do with digital publishing!

Ontologies is a branch of Metaphysics which interprets the nature of existence. In the past 30 years, much work and development has gone into to using ontologies and semantic hierarchies to interpret  relationships within text and the links which exist between text and images. Today, the use of ontologies and semantic hierarchy forms one of the core branches in information science on which Machine Learning is based.

Many publishers have for many years been collecting huge repositories of content and images from the production of their books. These datasets of content potentially offer both the publishers and their readers fresh opportunities to read and publish more content which is aligned with what the reader wishes to read.

Using Ontologies and Sematic classes of technology a publisher could approximate what Readers "like" and "dislike" and perhaps more importantly Readers could be presented with new reading choices, which are similar to the types of books and authors they already prefer.

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