Toward a New Generation of Semantic Web Applications

Abstract

Although research on integrating semantics with the Web started almost as soon as the Web was in place, a concrete Semantic Web that is, a large-scale collection of distributed semantic metadata emerged only over the past four to five years. The Semantic Web's embryonic nature is reflected in its existing applications. Most of these applications tend to produce and consume their own data, much like traditional knowledge- based applications, rather than actually exploiting the Semantic Web as a large-scale information source. These first-generation semantic Web applications typically use a single ontology that supports integration of resources selected at design time.