The DIP Project: Enabling Systems & Solutions for Processing Digital Content with Semantic Web Services

Current web services are based on – if not limited to – the interaction between humans and computer systems. Their extension to similar transactions between computers requires machine-processable semantics of data and information. The Semantic Web, initiated by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee [1], has the goal of developing adequate solutions for these problems. Through the use of ontologies and metadata – information about information – the Semantic Web enables the computer to query, retrieve and manage semi-structured information. The Semantic Web is therefore fundamental to enabling systems and solutions for processing information by providing a universally accessible platform. This allows it to be shared and processed by automated tools, by providing machine-understandable semantics that enable automatic processing and exchange. A range of mark-up frameworks and languages have already been developed, notably the revised Resource Description Framework (RDF) [4] and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) [3] which mark the emergence of the Semantic Web as a broad-based, commercial-grade platform. However, much work remains to be done for upper layers of the Semantic Web, which are considerable research challenges.