The Role of Ontology Engineering in Linked Data Publishing and Management: An Empirical Study

Introduction

In the last years we have seen a continuous uptake of semantic technologies - most recently on the open Web, driven by the Linked Data movement, but in equal measure also in enterprise environments. The key distinct feature of semantic computing compared to other information management technologies is their use of Web standards - languages for knowledge representation, as well as protocols for exposing, accessing and exchanging this knowledge - to structure and formalize information in a way that enables computers to 'understand' complex concepts and situations in a similar way as humans do. Ontologies, defined as reusable models capturing the knowledge in a given domain, are one of the core building blocks of the semantic-technologies stack. In combination with components for semantic data management, reasoning, search, as well as annotation and description of digital artifacts, they can facilitate the development of sophisticated - and economically feasible - solutions to many prevailing problems in today's information management.