Description Logics for the Semantic Web: Racer as a Basis for Building Agent Systems.
Ralf Möller, Volker Haarslev · Künstliche Intell. · 2003
The term Semantic Web denotes a vision of a new World-Wide Web in which different kinds of resources (data, services, Web pages, etc.) are accessed and shared on the basis of formal representation structures [6]. As a well-motivated design decision and in order to integrate Semantic Web facilities into the existing software infrastructure of the current Web, its main XML-based syntactic representation formats and their processing conventions are taken for granted. However, in contrast to the standard way of accessing current Web resources by means of surface-oriented syntactic comparison operations, the main idea of the Semantic Web is to answer different kinds of queries w.r.t. a specific conceptual data model rich enough in expressivity to adequately describe the interrelationships between basic representational units (names, symbols) on which a piece of software for a certain application domain is based. Since symbols might have different meanings in different software applications, it is important to explicitly refer to meaning definitions given as a certain instance of an underlying conceptual data model. In the context of the Semantic Web, these definitions are seen as resources themselves and, for reasons of brevity, are often called ontologies. Ontologies provide the basis for implementing specific Semantic Web resources for encapsulating computational processes. These resources are called services [18]. Thus, ontologies play an important role for the Semantic Web. But who is responsible for building ontologies? Influenced by experiences with previous artificial intelligence approaches and motivated by the success of the current Web, many researchers argued for a decentralized logic-based approach [6], and it is the idea of a formal semantics on which the logic is based that led to the name of the proposed new medium: Semantic Web.