Yahoo! as an ontology

Abstract

We suggest that one (or a collection) of names of Yahoo! (or any other WWW indexer's) categories can be used to describe the content of a document. Such categories offer a standardized and universal way for referring to or describing the nature of real world objects, activities, documents and so on, and may be used (we suggest) to semantically characterize the content of documents. WWW indices, like Yahoo! provide a huge hierarchy of categories (topics) that touch every aspect of human endeavors. Such topics can be used as descriptors, similarly to the way librarians use for example, the Library of Congress cataloging system to annotate and categorize books.