| 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 a mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research; Aims to support more effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources; Covers significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a 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 visualization and knowledge sharing tools; Describes a system for storage and retrieval of metadata expressed in RDF and RDF Schema; Also discusses a system for automatic metadata extraction; Examines 3 case studies providing examples of the benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in "real world" situations. | |
