Practical knowledge representation for the Web
Frank van Harmelen · 1999
The lack of semantic markup is a major barrier to the development of more intelligent document processing on the Web. Current HTML markup is used only to indicate the structure and lay-out of documents, but not the document semantics. Unfortunately, proposals from the AI community for Web-based knowledge-representation languages can hardly expect wide acceptance on the Web. Even if unpalatable for the AI community, the question should instead be how well AI concepts can be fitted into the markup languages that are widely supported on the Web, either now or in the foreseeable future. We provide a survey and analysis of traditional, new, and arising Web standards and show how they can be used to represent machine-processable semantics of Web sources. The results of this paper should help AI researchers and practitioners to apply their results to real Web documents, instead of basing themselves on AI specific representations that have no chance of becoming widely used on the Web. (7 pages)