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Notion System

(R.A. Poell, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO))

Notion System exists since 1991 and can be considered as a prototype of a large-scale implementation. The generated contents consist of concepts (notions) and relationships between them. The multilingual system manages distributed data and is not domain specific. Various levels of detail of information can be registered. There are metadata available for automatic maintenance, filtering et cetera. Exploitation and inference logic are available as notions too. In many aspects Notion System is comparable to RDF(S).

The ideas behind this system can be a possible implementation of the Semantic Web in the future.

The Semantic Web based on these ideas will enable the enhancement of existing techniques (content analyses, NLP, and others) and enable automatic extension of the network. It will also allow new ways of searching and navigating and will promote new presentation techniques (probably 3D or 4D) using context sensitive delivery of information. Agents can deploy automatic information maintenance activities (relevance, validity). Probabilistic answers can be given to some questions, other questions will receive clear answers.

The resulting Semantic Web will be the collaborative work of all users, agents and systems connected to it.

One step further in the future, when the concepts themselves will be agents, the Semantic Web will be enhanced with even more features. Next, when the various devices, up till that moment only connected TO the Web, will be integrated IN the Semantic Web, new openings will be possible.