The Emerging Semantic Web

The World Wide Web has been the main source of an important shift in the way people get information and order services. However, the current Web is aimed at people only. The Semantic Web is a Web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but also for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. Facilities and technologies to put machine understandable data on the Web are rapidly becoming a high priority for many communities.

In order for computers to provide more help to people, the Semantic Web augments the current Web with formalized knowledge and data that can be processed by computers. It thus needs a language for expressing knowledge. This knowledge is used to describe the content of information sources, through ontologies, and the condition of operation of Web services. One of the challenges of the current Semantic Web development is the design of a framework that allows these resources to interoperate.

This book presents the state of the art in the development of the principles and technologies that will allow for the Semantic Web to become a reality. It contains revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the International Semantic Web Working Symposium that address the issues of languages, ontology’s, services, and interoperability.