Engineering Semantics on the Web
This event took place on Friday 16 January 2004 at 12:30

Prof. Enrico Motta KMi, The Open University, UK

In this talk I will discuss the various issues associated with the development and maintenance of semantic web sites, i.e., web sites augmented with semantic information, expressed using web-based knowledge representation languages, such as RDF or OWL.

I will begin the presentation by discussing the nature of semantic web sites and I will illustrate the various roles semantics can play, such as providing information about web resources, structuring the architecture of a site, or even providing the globality of a site specification, as in the OntoWeaver approach. Having distinguished between different kinds of semantic web sites, I will then discuss the kind of functionalities that a semantic approach enables. In particular, I will use the KMi web site as a test case and present a number of semantics-enabled services, providing support for query answering, information visualization and browsing, and user customization. In the talk I will also address the pragmatic issues associated with constructing semantic web sites, such as how to address the annotation bottleneck.

Hence, the purpose of the talk is two-fold: i) to illustrate the various issues associated with engineering semantic information on the web, and ii) to stimulate a discussion within KMi, both to gain an understanding of the advantages and costs associated with adding semantic information to the KMi web site, and to brainstorm about the kind of functionalities that such enhancement could enable.

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