KMi Publications

Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-09-06 Abstract


On the Integration of Services with the Web of Data
Techreport ID: kmi-09-06
Date: 2009
Author(s): Carlos Pedrinaci,John Domingue,Reto Krummenacher
Download PDF

Research on Semantic Web Services has pursued the automation of tasks on the Web by enriching Web services technologies with semantics. Thus far, however, Semantic Web Services have failed to gain a significant uptake due to a big extent to the complexity of the solutions proposed and the limited amount of high quality data and ontologies that were available until recently. In this report we explore the relationship between Semantic Web Services and the Web of Data. We identify the potential benefits that could be obtained by adequately integrating these so far disconnected worlds. We present a vision outlining how this integration could take place by using simpler vocabularies for describing services, through the adoption of linked data principles for publishing services on the Web, and by reusing principles originating research on Knowledge Based Systems and Knowledge Engineering such as the Blackboard model and Problem-Solving Methods. The vision presented herein represents at the same time the outline of a research roadmap we are pursuing and we shall, where appropriate, illustrate some of these ideas through concrete examples and prototypes we have already developed.
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.