Introduction

Abstract

The Web in its’ current form is an impressive success with a growing number of users and information sources. However, the growing complexity of the Web is not reflected in the current state of Web technology. The heavy burden of accessing, extracting, interpretating and maintaining information is left to the human user. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, coined the vision of a Semantic Web in which background knowledge on the meaning of Web resources is stored through the use of machine-processable (meta-)data. The Semantic Web should bring structure to the content of Web pages, being an extension of the current Web, in which information is given a well-defined meaning. Thus, the Semantic Web will be able to support automated services based on these descriptions of semantics. These descriptions are seen as a key factor to finding a way out of the growing problems of traversing the expanding Web space, where most Web resources can currently only be found through syntactic matches (e.g., keyword search).

Semantic Web — a web of data that can be processed directly or indirectly by machines. —(Berners-Lee, 1999)