(PDF paper, 88Kb)
Until now, the Web has been designed for direct human processing, but the next-generation Web, which Tim Berners-Lee and others call the "Semantic Web", aims at machine-processable information, enabling intelligent services such as information brokers, search agents, and information filters, which offers greater functionality and interoperability than the current stand-alone services. The Semantic will only be possible once further levels of interoperability have been established. Standards must be defined not only for the syntactic form of documents, but also for their semantic content. Notable among recent W3C standardization efforts are XML/XML Schema and RDF/RDF Schema, which facilitate semantic interoperability. In this article, we explain the role of ontologies in the architecture of the Semantic Web. We then briefly summarise key elements of XML and RDF, showing why using XML as a tool for semantic interoperability will be ineffective in the long run. We argue that a further representation and inference layer is needed on top of the Web's current layers, and to establish such a layer, we propose a general method for encoding ontology representation languages into RDF/RDF Schema. We illustrate the extension method by applying it to OIL, an ontology representation and inference language.
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(PDF paper, 88Kb)
@Article{,
author = "Stefan Decker and Sergey Melnik and Frank Van Harmelen and
Dieter Fensel and Michel Klein and Jeen Broekstra and
Michael Erdmann and Ian Horrocks",
title = "The Semantic Web: The roles of XML and RDF",
journal = "IEEE Internet Computing",
year = 2000,
volume = "15",
number = "3",
pages = "63--74",
month = "October"
}
Copyright © IEEE 2000
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