Watson

Exploring the Semantic Web

As the Semantic Web gains momentum, large amounts of semantic information are becoming available online. The emergence of such large-scale semantics opens the way to a new generation of Semantic Systems, able to overcome the brittleness of classic domain-specific semantic systems and supporting open-ended tasks, such as web browsing and question answering. Watson is an innovative gateway for the Semantic Web, whose design has been guided by the requirements of this new generation of Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. Watson plays three main roles: 1) collects the available semantic content on the Web, 2) analyzes it to extract useful metadata and indexes, and 3) implements efficient query facilities to access these data, which are structured around thousand and thousand of separate ontologies.