BRIDGING THE GAP: FROM TRADITIONAL INFORMATIONRETRIEVAL TO THE SEMANTIC WEB
Morgan C. Benton, Eun Hee Kim, Benjamin K. Ngugi · 2002
A chief difference between the current incarnation of the World Wide Web and the new vision of the Semantic Web is the nature of information search. The Semantic Web vision reveals a radical departure from the traditional theories of Information Retrieval (IR) upon which current search engine technology is built. Semantic Web researchers are very articulate about how the pillars of the Semantic Websemantically aware, intelligent agents, ontologies, and markup languageswill revolutionize the way that we interact with information on the web. They are less articulate about how we will get there from here. While its true that the traditional assumptions of IRsmall, static, homogeneous, centrally located, monolingual document collectionsdont hold for the Web, still it is important to note the success of search engines built on IR theory. This paper calls attention to the gap between traditional IR and the more visionary Semantic Web research. We describe a preliminary roadmap bridging the two areas focusing on the concrete contributions and also