Section: Application Domains

Semantic web technologies

The main application context motivating our work is the “semantic web” infrastructure.

Internet technologies support organisations and people in accessing and sharing knowledge, often difficult to access in a documentary form. However, these technologies quickly reach their limits: web site organisation is expensive and full-text search inefficient. Content-based information search is becoming a necessity. Content representation enables computers to manipulate knowledge on a more formal ground and to carry out similarity or generality search. Knowledge representation formalisms are good candidates for expressing content.

The vision of a “semantic web” [17] complements the web, with formal knowledge representation spanning across sites. Taking advantage of this semantic web requires the manipulation of various knowledge representation formats. Exmo concerns are thus central to the semantic web implementation. Our work aims at enhancing content understanding, including the intelligibility of communicated knowledge and formal knowledge transformations.

In addition, Exmo considers more specific uses of semantic web technologies in wider contexts.