The Semantic Web Technologies
Workshops organized by the European Commission have isolated four investigation domains:
metadata collection, ontologies and equivalence between ontologies, visualization, and
the "agent paradigm," which was present throughout the presentations.
After one and a half days and a number of short presentations, the organizers have
extracted four principal themes that might form the axes for research in the year 2001.
- The first step is to collect information. The first theme is thus about
collecting metadata, either by facilitating or inciting its creation or by extracting it
from documents. The subject is broad since it covers all document types, including
multimedia, as well as in-band and out-of-band metadata.
- The second issue is to connect the different ontologies that
appear. The number of projects for representing ontologies and the specialization of each shows
that there will
be many taxonomy systems. The second theme thus covers these ontologies and the equivalence
between them.
- The last issue directly linked with ontologies is how to present the results to
users. The third theme is thus about visualization.
- Finally, the concept of "agents" seems to be the key that will give users a
chance to find their way around the semantic web. Here again, the number of projects and
their specialization shows the need to establish some kind of communication between agents,
a perspective that will probably require specifying some metadata about the agents themselves.
The report of this workshop will be published on the IST
web site.
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