Integrating Language Understanding Agents Into the Semantic Web
Akshay Java, Tim Finin, Sergei Nirenburg · 2005
Many intelligent agents need knowledge and information to support their reasoning and problem solving. The World Wide Web is a vast, open, accessible and free source of knowledge, but virtually all of it is encoded as natural lan-guage text – a form difficult for most agents to directly un-derstand. We describe initial work on adapting a mature lan-guage understanding agent to process Web text and publish its output in the Semantic Web language OWL. This approach adds knowledge on the Web in a form designed for agents to use. Moreover, language understanding agents can use the growing knowledge on the Semantic Web in their own lan-guage understanding tasks. Importing and exporting knowl-edge in the different knowledge representation formalisms used by these agents poses significant challenges. In particu-lar we need to bridge the gap between the representation fea-tures of traditional non web-based representations and newer web-based formalisms such as OWL.