REWERSE
WonderWeb was a research project funded by European Commission Information Society Technologies Programme under the Future and Emerging Technologies action line.
Brief Description
We are on the brink of a new generation of World Wide Web (WWW)
which, in his recent book Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee
calls the Semantic Web. Unlike the existing WWW, where data is
primarily intended for human consumption, the Semantic Web will
provide data that is also machine processable. This will enable a wide
range of intelligent services such as information brokers, search
agents, information filters etc., a process that Berners-Lee describes
as "Bringing the Web to its full potential". The importance of
research in this area is indicated by the recently announced DAML
initiative in the USA, under whose aegis projects aimed at developing
the Semantic Web will receive DARPA funding totalling $70 million.
The development of ontologies will be central to this
effort. Ontologies are meta data, providing a controlled vocabulary of
terms, each with an explicitly defined and machine processable
semantics. By defining shared and common domain theories, ontologies
help both people and machines to communicate more effectively. They
will therefore have a crucial role in enabling content-based access,
interoperability and communication across the Web, providing it with a
qualitatively new level of service: the Semantic Web. Examples of the
use of ontologies to support content-based access and interoperability
can already be seen in e.g., the American SHOE project (in
which HTML is being extended with ontology based semantic markup
codes) and the European IST-project ON-TO-KNOWLEDGE (in which
ontologies are being used to facilitate access to large intranets).
The Semantic Web will also be crucial to the development of Web
applications such as e-commerce, providing users with much more
sophisticated searching and browsing capabilities as well as support
from intelligent agents such as shopbots (shopping "robots" that
access vendor Web sites, compare prices etc.). Examples of the use of
ontologies/taxonomies to support searching and browsing can already be
seen at e.g., Yahoo Shopping
and amazon.com.
The importance of ontologies to the Semantic Web has prompted the
development of schema extensions to existing Web standard
languages: XML has been extended to give XML-Schema (XMLS), while RDF
has been extended to give RDF-Schema (RDFS). However, the language
primitives provided by these standards are extremely basic when
compared with those typically provided by ontology languages developed
within the Knowledge Representation (KR) community, and efforts are
already underway to develop ontology extensions of these
standards. The aim of the project is to develop the infrastructure
required for the large-scale deployment of ontologies as the
foundation for the Semantic Web. This will involve not only the
establishment of a Web standard ontology language, but also the
parallel development of the ontological engineering technology that
will be required in order to "bring the web to its full potential".
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