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IAF Calls & Action Lines
Beyond RDF(S): the Ontology perspective for the Semantic Web
(Rudi Studer, University of Karlsruhe and ontoprise GmbH)
Currently, we are entering the process of transforming the 'first generation web', that is characterized by HTML pages and human processing of Web contents, to the 'second generation web' or the 'Semantic Web' that aims at machine-processable information. To achieve that next level one needs means and standards not only for describing the syntactic structure of Web documents as offered by XML, but also means and standards for specifying the semantic content of Web sources. RDF/RDF schema offers a first step in this direction.
We argue that ontologies will play a crucial role in enabling the 'Semantic Web'. In our context ontologies provide a formal conceptualization of particular domains that is shared between people and/or application systems. Ontologies may be specified by languages that are defined as extensions of RDFS, as e.g. OIL, and may be supported by a 'Semantic Web' infrastructure that offers means for storing ontologies and for making inferences. Of course, sophisticated ontology engineering environments are required that support the construction, learning, reuse and maintenance of ontologies.
Ontologies are also the backbone for metadata management since they pave the way for the semi-automatic semantic annotation of Web pages as well as for information extraction from Web sources.
- Presentation slides
- e-mail: studer@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
- URL: http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS, http://www.ontoprise.de
- Relevant links
- http://Ontobroker.SemanticWeb.org/
- http://www.semanticweb.org
- http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil
- http://DAML.SemanticWeb.org/
- http://www.w3.org/RDF/