Knowledge Engineering rediscovered: Towards Reasoning Patterns for the Semantic Web

Frank van Harmelen
Annette ten Teije
Holger Wache

The extensive work on Knowledge Engineering in the 1990s has resulted in a systematic analysis of task-types, and the corresponding problem solving methods that can be deployed for different types of tasks. That analysis was the basis for a sound and widely accepted methodology for building knowledge-based systems, and has made it is possible to build libraries of reusable models, methods and code. In this paper, we make a first attempt at a similar analysis for Semantic Web applications. We will show that it is possible to identify a relatively small number of task-types, and that, somewhat surprisingly, a large set of Semantic Web applications can be described in this typology. Secondly, we show that it is possible to decompose these task-types into a small number of primitive (``atomic'') inference steps. We give semi-formal definitions for both the task-types and the primitive inference steps that we identify. We substantiate our claim that our task-types are sufficient to cover the vast majority of Semantic Web applications by showing that all entries of the Semantic Web Challenges of the last 3 years can be classified in these task-types.

(PDF paper, 69Kb) 

@InProceedings{KCAP09,
  author =       "F. van Harmelen and A. ten Teije and H. Wache",
  title =        "Knowledge Engineering rediscovered: Towards Reasoning Patterns for the Semantic Web
",
  editor =       "N. Noy",
  pages =        "81-88",
  booktitle =    "The Fifth International Conference on Knowledge Capture",
  publisher =    "ACM",
  year =         2009,
  keywords = {Semantic Web},
  urlPaper = "http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/KCAP09.pdf"
}
Copyright © ACM 2009

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