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.

• Foreword.
• Affiliations.
• Acknowledgements.
• Introduction (Davies, Fensel and van Harmelen).
• OIL and DAML+OIL: Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web (Fensel, van Harmelen and Horrocks).
• A Methodology for Ontology-based Knowledge Management (Sure and Studer).
• Ontology Management: Storing, Aligning and Maintaining Ontologies (Klein, Ding, Fensel and Omelayenko).
• Sesame: A Generic Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and RDF Schema (Broekstra, Kampman and van Harmelen).
• Generating Ontologies for the Semantic Web: OntoBuilder (Engels and Lech).
• OntoEdit: Collaborative Engineering of Ontologies (Sure, Erdmann and Studer).
• QuizRDF: Search Technology for the Semantic Web (Davies, Weeks and Krohn).
• Spectacle (Fluit, Horst, van der Meer, Sabou and Mika).
• OntoShare: Evolving Ontologies in a Knowledge Sharing System (Davies, Duke and Stonkus).
• Ontology Middleware and Reasoning (Kiryakov, Simov and Ognyanov).
• Ontology-based Knowledge Management at Work: The Swiss Life Case Studies (Reimer, Brockhausen, Lau and Reich).
• Field Experimenting with Semantic Web Tools in a Virtual Organization (Iosif, Mika, Larsson and Akkermans).
• A Future Perspective: Peer-2-Peer Enabled Semantic Web for Knowledge Management (Fensel, Staab, Studer, van Harmelen and Davies).
• Conclusions: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management - Towards the Semantic Web? (Davies, Fensel and van Harmelen).
• References.