A layered architecture proposed by Berners-Lee for the Semantic Web applications. In this architecture, ontologies occupy a central place: they are built on the top of the RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RDFS (RDF Schema) layers, which are in turn built on the top of the XML layer.
Published in Chapter:
RDF and OWL for Knowledge Management
Gian Piero Zarri (University Paris Est and LISSI Laboratory, France)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-931-1.ch130
Abstract
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.