What is Semantic Web Rules

As Web-based content becomes an increasingly important knowledge management resource, Webbased technologies are developing to help harness that resource in a more effective way. The current state of these Web-based technology – the ‘first generation’ or ‘syntactic’ Web – gives rise to well known, serious problems when trying to accomplish in a non-trivial way essential management tasks like indexing, searching, extracting, maintaining and generating information. These tasks would, in fact, require some sort of ‘deep understanding’ of the information dealt with: in a ‘syntactic’ Web context, on the contrary, computers are only used as tools for posting and rendering information by brute force. Faced with this situation, Tim Berners-Lee first proposed a sort of ‘Semantic Web’ (SW) where the access to information is based mainly on the processing of the semantic properties of this information: “… the Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning (emphasis added), better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation” (Berners-Lee et al., 2001: 35). The Semantic Web’s challenge consists then in being able to manage information on the Web by ‘understanding’ its proper semantic content (its meaning), and not simply by matching some keywords.