Searching and Smushing on the Semantic Web - Challenges for Soft Computing

The World Wide Web is an astonishing information repository, founded on the simple principles that any web resource can link to any other web resource and that as little as possible should be centrally regulated and imposed. In practice, access to the right information on the web is hampered by the sheer volume of data. Tim Berners-Lee, widely acknowledged as the “father of the web” has pointed out that this is mainly due to the data being machine-readable but not machine-understandable, and has proposed an extension to the current web, known as the semantic web. This allows relational knowledge to be encoded in web pages, enabling machines to use inference rules in retrieving and manipulating data. In turn, this will reduce the quantity of irrelevant data retrieved and increase the usefulness of the web. In order to facilitate the interface between human and machine understanding of data, there is a need to incorporate uncertainty into the knowledge representation and greater flexibility into matching and inference. This is in line with current practice — uncertainty is implicitly handled by most search engines that return a list of pages ranked by their “degree of relevance” to the query.