Semantic Web Technologies

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the data-centric, customizable XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) to provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of web-based information. Software agents will be able to create automatically new services from already published services, with potentially huge implications for models of e-Business. Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research. The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is being applied in knowledge management (''Semantic Information Access'') and in the next generation of Web services.