SHOE: A Blueprint for the Semantic Web
Jeff Heflin, James Hendler, Sean Luke · The MIT Press eBooks · 2003
The term Semantic Web was coined by Tim Berners-Lee to describe his proposal for "a web of meaning," as opposed to the "web of links" that currently exists on the Internet. Toachieve this vision, we need to develop languages and tools that enable machine understandable web pages. The SHOE project, begun in 1995, was one of the first efforts to explore these issues. In this paper, we describe our experiences developing and using the SHOE language. Webeginby describing the unique features of the World Wide Web and how they must influence potential Semantic Web languages. Then we present SHOE, a language whichallows web pages to be annotated with semantics, describe its syntax and semantics, and discuss our approaches to handling the problems of interoperability in distributed environments and ontology evolution. Finally,weprovide an overview of a suite of tools for the Semantic Web, and discuss the application of the language and tools to two different domains.