Unifying Reasoning and Search to Web Scale

Dieter Fensel
Frank van Harmelen

Current approaches to reasoning on the Semantic Web do not scale. We argue that by fusing reasoning (in the sense of logic) with search (in the sense of Information Retrieval), and taking seriously the notion of limited rationality (in the sense of Herbert Simon) would be a paradigm shift leading to reasoning at Web scale.
<PROVOCATION>
Traditional notions of complete and correct reasoning are obviously based on a heavily simplified world view naively applied to reality.
Spoken cynically, current reasoning engines have inherited clumpy syntax from the Web (XML, RDF, and URIs), and in return, the Web has received toy engines that neither meet its requirements nor scale to its size.
Rather than adding bizarre syntax to our languages or nonscalable logic to superficially align Web principles and reasoning, we seek to reflect on the underlying principles, exclude those that don’t fit, and merge the remainder in something new that reflects proper unification.
</PROVOCATION>


(PDF paper, 117Kb) 

@Article{IEEE-IC07,
  author = 	 "Dieter Fensel and Frank van Harmelen",
  title = 	 "Unifying Reasoning and Search to Web Scale",
  journal =	 "IEEE Internet Computing",
  year =	 2007,
  volume =	 "11",
  number =	 "2",
  pages =	 "94--96",
  month =	 "March/April",
  keywords = {Semantic Web},
  urlPaper = "http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/IEEE-IC07.pdf"
}
Copyright © IEEE 2000

<- Back to list of papers