Any ideas how i'de write some engine to figure out relationships between topics on teh intarwebs?

suggestions high or low level etc? This is an application of Ontology right?

ie, learn that drupal is related to php, civicrm is related to drupal (civicrm is a sideproject using drupal)

could do straight keyword analyses but im not sure thats the way

or is this the same 'holy grail' that search engines are trying todo? ie figure out that a dog is an animal, and the dog subject is related to animal?

Drupal 7 (upcoming release) will be packing default RDF support, which will help a lot more of the web use this tech, so maybe we'll just have to wait till more sites are using RDF to be able todo these kinds of queries? (Ie search for sites that are about 'dogs' that have a parent of topic 'animals', tho youde probably only get sites written in drupal about those topics)

note: this is nothing new, previous discussions go back nearly a decade see;

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tmrdf.html
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/rdf.html

topic map engines such as those from ontopia.net start from "as little as" EU12000! and i'm still not sure if you need to teach it or it can learn for itself, customers of this system are often places like media outlets who use the service to organise their content

http://www.ontopia.net/solutions/pricelist.html

and finally..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps

Update:

Some people seem to be already making headway here..

Drupal module for topic map management using existing drupal nodes (topic mapping not be confused with just linearizing your taxonomy)

http://www.universalpantograph.com/drupal-topic-map-module

got any clues? message me via twitter "dgtlmoon"