Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Tim Berners-Lee et al. (2001) explained the Semantic Web as follows:
At the doctor's office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through
her handheld web browser. The agent promptly retrieved information
about Mom's
prescribed treatment
from the doctor's agent, looked up
several lists of
providers
, and checked for the ones
in-plan
for Mom's
insurance within a
20-mile
radius of her
home
and with a
rating
of
excellent
or
very good
on trusted rating services. It then began trying
to find a match between available
appointment times
(supplied by the
agents of individual providers through their web sites) and Pete's and
Lucy's busy schedules.
Hewlett-Packard's Semantic Web Research Group frequently circulates
items of interest such as news articles, software tools, and links to websites.
They call these snippets, or information nuggets (Cayzer 2004). Because
e-mail is not the ideal medium for this type of content, they needed to find
a technique for decentralized, informal knowledge management. They
began a research project to create a system that was capable of aggregat-
ing, annotating, indexing, and searching a community's snippets. For this
system, the required characteristics include:
1. Ease of use and capture.
2. Decentralized aggregation. Snippets will be in a variety of locations
and formats. It will be necessary to integrate them and perform some
global search over the result.
3. Distributed knowledge. The information consumer should be able to
add value by enriching snippets at the point of use by adding ratings,
annotations, etc.
4. Flexible data model. Snippets are polymorphic. The system should
be able to handle e-mail, web pages, documents, text fragments,
images, etc.
5. Extensibility. It should be possible to extend the snippet data schema
to model the changing world.
6. Inferencing capability. It should be possible to infer new metadata
from old. For example, a machine should know that a snippet about
a particular HP Photosmart model is about a digital camera.
Some have suggested that blogs make the ideal tool for this type of con-
tent and knowledge management. However, today's blogging tools offer
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