The Semantic Web

Abstract

The development of the World Wide Web is a great success story with respect to the number of users and the amount of information that is nowadays offered by the WWW. However, most of the information that is available has to be interpreted by humans; machine support is rather limited. In order to get rid of that limitation, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, coined the vision of the Semantic Web: to make the contents of the WWW accessible and interpretable by machines [Berners-Lee et al., 2001; Fensel et al., 2002; Davies et al., 2002], Today it is almost impossible to integrate information that is spread over several Web or intranet pages. Consider, e. g., the query for a data mining expert in a company intranet, where the only explicit information stored are the relationships between people and the projects they work in on the one hand, and between projects and the topics they address on the other hand. In that case, a skills management system should be able to combine the information on the employees' home pages with the information on the projects' home pages in order to find the respective expert. To realize such scenarios, metadata have to be interpreted and appropriately combined by machines [Lau and Sure, 2002].