ACM TechNews
Semantics Gives the Web Meaning--for Machines
ICT Results (07/16/08)
European researchers have long pursued the dream of giving form to the
Semantic Web, envisioned as a web of data that imbues words and digits with
meaning that computers can comprehend in order to realize "the vision for
interoperability between data sources on the Web" and to give the
information "meaning in a way that computers can understand and reason with
it," according to Frank van Harmelen of the Free University of Amsterdam's
Department of Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Web research is not
restricted to Europe, but the EU's Sixth Framework Program for research has
underwritten 17 Semantic Web projects and some 50 million euros are
apportioned for continued Semantic Web research yearly under the Seventh
Framework Program. A major European focus is the engineering of
ontologies, which are collections of associated concepts used to infuse
data with meaning and represent the relationships between data. Natural
language processing is another important area of European research, with
current projects concentrating on the construction of automated semantic
extraction engines. European projects seeking to tackle the Semantic Web's
"reasoning" challenge include LarKC, a platform for massive, distributed,
incomplete reasoning that will facilitate scalability both via its
incompleteness and its parallel processing; and the REWERSE project to
develop a set of interoperable reasoning languages for advanced Web systems
and applications that will be submitted to entities such as the World Wide
Web Consortium as the chief foundation for international standards. Yahoo
announced in February that the Semantic Web's RDF format would be supported
by its indexing, which will undoubtedly spur demand for semantic
technologies.
http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/
BrowsingType/Features/ID/89880/highlights/semantics
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