Introduction to Semantic Knowledge Management

Despite its explosive growth over the last decade, the Web remains essentially a tool to allow humans to access information. The Semantic Web will extend the web's capability through the increased availability of machine-processable information.

Currently, Web-based information is based primarily on documents written in HTML, a language useful for describing the visual presentation of Web pages through a browser. HTML and today's Web, however, offer only very limited ways of describing the content itself. So, for example, you can specify that a given string should be displayed in a large bold font but you cannot specify that the string represents a product code or a product price.

As described in the following chapters, Semantic Web Technology aims to address this shortcoming using the descriptive languages RDF and OWL, and the data-centric, customizable markup language XML. These technologies, which are standards of the W3C¹ (WorldWideWeb Consortium), allow rich descriptions of the content of Web documents. These machine-processable descriptions in turn allow more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of Web-based information.