Continuous quantities abound in the physical world. Properties in our environment, such as colour, shape, sound, texture, amongst many others, are routinely discussed. Yet natural languages are not adept at describing these continuous quantities precisely, nor are they easily incorporated into ontologies in the form of discrete terms. This book analyses the way that natural languages describe continuous quantities, proposes a general semantics based on metric spaces, and describes how to treat semantic values computationally, so that we may automate the processing of texts which describe...

This book describes OCLC's contributions to the transformation of the Internet from a web of documents to a Web of Data. The new Web is a growing `cloud' of interconnected resources that identify the things people want to know about when they approach the Internet with an information need. The linked data architecture has achieved critical mass just as it has become clear that library standards for resource description are nearing obsolescence. Working for the world's largest library cooperative, OCLC researchers have been active participants in the development of next-generation standards...