Ontologies and the Semantic Web本体与语义网.pptVIP

Ontologies and the Semantic Web Ian Horrocks horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk Information Management Group School of Computer Science University of Manchester The Semantic Web Today’s Web Distributed hypertext/hypermedia Information accessed via (keyword based) search and browse Browser tools render information for human consumption What is the Semantic Web? Web was “invented” by Tim Berners-Lee (amongst others), a physicist working at CERN His vision of the Web was much more ambitious than the reality of the existing (syntactic) Web: This vision of the Web has become known as the Semantic Web Hard Work using “Syntactic Web” Impossible (?) using “Syntactic Web” Complex queries involving background knowledge Find information about “animals that use sonar but are neither bats nor dolphins” Locating information in data repositories Travel enquiries Prices of goods and services Results of human genome experiments Finding and using “web services” Given a DNA sequence, identify its genes, determine the proteins they can produce, and hence the biological processes they control Delegating complex tasks to web “agents” Book me a holiday next weekend somewhere warm, not too far away, and where they speak either French or English What is the Problem? What is the (Proposed) Solution? Add semantic annotations to web resources What is the (Proposed) Solution? Giving Semantics to Annotations External agreement on meaning of annotations Agree on meaning of a set of annotation tags E.g., Dublin Core Limited flexibility and extensibility Limited number of things can be expressed Use Ontologies to specify meaning of annotations Agree on language used to describe meaning Meanings of vocabularies of terms given by ontologies New terms can be formed by combining existing ones Meaning (semantics) of such terms is formally specified Can combine/relate terms in multiple ontologies Ontologies Ontology: Origins and History In Philosophy, fundamental branch of metaphysics Studies “being” or “ex