Spinning The Semantic Web ─ Bringing The World Wide Web To Its Full Potential

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult forusers to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such asHTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which isexpressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchyand standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using aflexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information -- displayelements, metadata, services, images, and especially content -- accessible. The result will be animmense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications.This firsthandbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate andcollect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, andknowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The trulyinterdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages,natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents,and databases.

Wolfgang Wahlster is Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Computer Science at the Universitat des Saarlandes, Saarbrucken.