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INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON CANADIAN SEMANTIC WEB
Author(s) -
Tadiou Kone Mamadou,
Lemire Daniel
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
computational intelligence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.353
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 1467-8640
pISSN - 0824-7935
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8640.2007.00306.x
Subject(s) - citation , computer science , world wide web , library science
Since its creation a number of years ago, the World Wide Web has revolutionized the way entertainment, research, and business are conducted in modern society. However, most of the current Web is conceived for human understanding and software applications or agents cannot easily infer the meaning of its content. The Semantic Web, as an extension of the current Web, aims to bring structured data for computer programs to “understand” and process. According to Tim Berners-Lee, in this vision, humans and machines will be able to work, reason, and solve complex tasks in cooperation. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web which will contain most of human knowledge in a form allowing some automated reasoning services (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila 2001). It has been described by enthusiasts as the creation of a distributed brain (Fensel and Musen 2001). It is to be based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) (Lassila and Swick 1999) which grants each possible object a unique identifier: “The Semantic Web, in naming every concept simply by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort” (Berners-Lee et al. 2001, 43). RDF further organizes these URIs to allow at least some automated reasoning. Berners-Lee et al. (2001) believe that instead of turning HTML pages into indexes of words, as is currently done, we will turn them into indexes of RDF objects, making the Web “one giant database, rather than one giant book” (Berners-Lee n.d.). This special issue of Computational Intelligence stems from the first Canadian Semantic Web Working symposium held in June 2006 in Québec City, Québec, Canada. From this event, a number of expanded and improved versions of papers been selected on the topics of languages, tools, and methodologies for the Semantic Web; Semantic Web-based ontology management and engineering; and practical applications of Semantic Web techniques.