Ontobroker : Transforming the WWW into a Knowledge Base

The World Wide Web (WWW) can be viewed as the largest knowledge base that has ever existed. However, its support in automated inference is very limited. We propose formalized ontologies as means to enrich web documents for representing semantic information to overcome this bottleneck. Ontologies enable informed search as well as the derivation of new knowledge that is not directly represented in the WWW. Such an ontology can be used by a subgroup of web users that share a common point of interest or by intranets of companies and other organisations. The paper describes a software tool calledOntobroker that provide the necessary support in realizing this idea. Basically it provides formalisms for formulating queries, for defining ontologies, and for annotating HTML documents with ontological information; a webcrawler that collects information from the web; and an inference engine that enable query answering based on the ontology and the collected facts.

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