The Semantic Web. Enabling innovative approaches for handling information and services

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would now rather move into a more technical presentation compared to the first keynote speaker. So the basic idea is to outline: What kind of methods we have around in the Semantic Web area and how these methods could be used for developing, what I called “Innovative Approaches for Handling Information and Services”. What’s the outline of my talk? Well, I would like to start with the presentation: What are the basic ingredients of that Semantic Web vision. Then I would like to address more application oriented aspects and show you some scenarios, where you can see, how these methods are applied in innovative ways. One is: How you can use semantically enhanced Wiki environments to provide the content you need in Semantic Web applications. The third aspect will address the application you are all experts in: how you can apply Semantic Web standards in order to describe licence information, licence issues and then exploit that kind of models in order to access publications and pictures or whatever you are interesting in the end. And I would like to conclude with some personal vision over what I think is what some people call “Web 3.0”, some people still call it “Semantic Web”, some people call it “Enhanced Web 2.0”. So there are a lot of notions around. I will use the term “Web 3.0” in order to indicate what I see as a trend and what kind of technologies really come together to realize that vision. Ok, let me start with describing the idea of the Semantic Web. Well, we are all for familiar with what I call here the “Classical Web”. What is the basic idea? We have a lot of content and I stress here the semi-structured content, a lot of documents, maybe some documents describe XML and these kind of standards. And the basic idea is that content is provided for human consumption. So that you as a reader browse around in the web and you collect the information from these web resources in order to get informed about the information, you are interested in. The main problem we have, when you think of automatising some of these processes is, that when you think of application-systems or computers, that should get hold of the content of these kinds of documents. It’s very difficult to grasp automatically the meaning of that content. And what is the Semantic Web vision about how to get rid to some extent of that problem. So that computers are able to really get hold of some aspects of the content of your documents. And the third ingredient of the classical web is that keyword-based search that is provided by all these nice companies and tools you are all familiar with. And the basic problem you