Building and Using the Semantic Web

The development of the Semantic Web is still in its early phase when compared to the success story of the World Wide Web during the last decade. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that some of the underlying technologies, like e.g. the web ontology language OWL (cf. therefore not ready for daily usage. On the other hand, we face the problem of bootstrapping the development of the Semantic Web by building up ontologies and supplying related metadata that are then usable for realizing Semantic Web applications. Semantic Web Mining [Berendt02] can help in setting up the Semantic Web. A backbone of the Semantic Web are ontologies, which at the present are often handcrafted, maybe by using an ontology development methodology [Sure02a, Sure02b]. This is not a scalable solution for a wide-range application of Semantic Web technologies. The challenge is to learn ontologies in a (semi-)automatic way [Maedche01]. In the same way, the manual annotation of web pages does not scale up. Therefore, methods and tools are required that enable the (semi-)automatic generation of metadata [Handschuh02].