Towards the Semantic Web

Generating huge interest and backed by the global WorldWideWeb consortium the semantic web is the key initiative driving the future of the World Wide Web. Towards the Semantic Web focuses on the application of Semantic Web technology and ontologies in particular to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal structures supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to represent explicitly the semantics of structured and semi-structured information which enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Covering the key technologies for the next generation of the WWW, this book is an excellent mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research.* Aims to support more efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources.* Covers highly significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a coherent methodology for the application of the tools for business advantage.* Provides guidelines for introducing knowledge management concepts and tools into businesses.* Introduces an intelligent search tool that supports users in accessing information and a tool environment for maintenance, conversion and acquisition of information sources. Also describes information visualisation and knowledge sharing tools.* Describes a state-of-the-art system for storage and retrieval of metadata expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. Also discusses a system for automatic metadata extraction.* Examines three significant case studies providing examples of the real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in real world situations.Aimed primarily at researchers and developers in the area of WWW-based knowledge management and information retrieval. It will also be a useful reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level, academic and industrial researchers in the field, business managers who are aiming to increase the corporations' information infrastructure and industrial personnel who are tracking WWW technology developments in order to understand the business implications.