Towards the Semantic Web

Generating huge interest and backed by the global WorldWideWeb consortium the semantic web is the key initiative driving the future of the World Wide Web. Towards the Semantic Web focuses on the application of Semantic Web technology and ontologies in particular to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal structures supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to represent explicitly the semantics of structured and semi-structured information which enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Covering the key technologies for the next generation of the WWW, this book is an excellent mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research.
* Aims to support more efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources.
* Covers highly significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a coherent methodology for the application of the tools for business advantage.
* Provides guidelines for introducing knowledge management concepts and tools into businesses.
* Introduces an intelligent search tool that supports users in accessing information and a tool environment for maintenance, conversion and acquisition of information sources. Also describes information visualisation and knowledge sharing tools.
* Describes a state-of-the-art system for storage and retrieval of metadata expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. Also discusses a system for automatic metadata extraction.
* Examines three significant case studies providing examples of the real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in "real world" situations.
Aimed primarily at researchers and developers in the area of WWW-based knowledge management and information retrieval. It will also be a useful reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level, academic and industrial researchers in the field, business managers who are aiming to increase the corporations' information infrastructure and industrial personnel who are tracking WWW technology developments in order to understand the business implications.

John Davies leads the Semantic Technology research group at BT. Current interests centre around the application of semantic web technology to business intelligence, information integration, knowledge management and service-oriented environments. He is Project Director of the 12m ACTIVE EU integrated project. He co-founded the European Semantic Web conference series. He is also chairman of the European Semantic Technology Conference and a Vice-President of the Semantic Technology Institute. He chairs the NESSI Semantic Technology working group. He has written and edited many papers and books in the areas of the semantic technology, web-based information management and knowledge management; and has served on the program committee of numerous conferences in these and related areas. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer. Earlier research at BT let to the development of a set of knowledge management tools which are the subject of a number of patents. These tools were spun out of BT and are now marketed by infonic Ltd, of which Dr. Davies is Group Technical Advisor. Dr, Davies received the BT Award for Technology Entrepreneurship for his contribution to the creation of infonic. Dieter Fensel is a German researcher in languages and the semantic web. He is a professor at the University of Innsbruck and the director of the Semantic Technologies Institute Innsbruck, which is a research group at the university. Frank van Harmelen is the editor of Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management, published by Wiley.

Foreword. Biographies. List of Contributors. Acknowledgments. Introduction (J. Davies, et al.). OIL and DAML+OIL: Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web (D. Fensel, et al.). A Methodology for Ontology-based Knowledge Management (Y. Sure and R. Studer). Ontology Management: Storing, Aligning and Maintaining Ontologies (M. Klein, et al.).  Sesame: A Generic Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and RDF Schema (J. Broekstra, et al.). Generating Ontologies for the Semantic Web: OntoBuilder (R. Engels and T. Lech). OntoEdit: Collaborative Engineering of Ontologies (Y. Sure, et al.).  QuizRDF: Search Technology for the Semantic Web (J. Davies, et al.). Spectacle (C. Fluit, et al.). OntoShare: Evolving Ontologies in a Knowledge Sharing System (J. Davies, et al.). Ontology Middleware and Reasoning (A. Kiryakov, et al.). Ontology-based Knowledge Management at Work: The Swiss Life Case Studies (U. Reimer, et al.). Field Experimenting with Semantic Web Tools in a Virtual Organization (V. Iosif, et al.). A Future Perspective: Exploiting Peer-to-Peer and the Semantic Web for Knowledge Management (D. Fensel, et al.). Conclusions: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management - Towards the Semantic Web? (J. Davies, et al.). References. Index.