John Davies & Rudi Studer 
Semantic Web Technologies 
Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems

The Semantic Web combines the descriptive languages RDF (Resource
Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language), with the
data-centric, customizable XML (e Xtensible Mark-up Language) to
provide descriptions of the content of Web documents. These
machine-interpretable descriptions allow more intelligent software
systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of
web-based information.

Software agents will be able to create automatically new
services from already published services, with potentially huge
implications for models of e-Business.

Semantic Web Technologies provides a comprehensive
overview of key semantic knowledge technologies and research.
The authors explain (semi-)automatic ontology generation and
metadata extraction in depth, along with ontology management and
mediation. Further chapters examine how Semantic Web technology is
being applied in knowledge management (‘Semantic Information
Access’) and in the next generation of Web services.

Semantic Web Technologies:

* Provides a comprehensive exposition of the state-of-the art in
Semantic Web research and key technologies.

* Explains the use of ontologies and metadata to achieve
machine-interpretability.

* Describes methods for ontology learning and metadata
generation.

* Discusses ontology management and evolution, covering ontology
change detection and propagation, ontology dependency and
mediation.

* Illustrates the theoretical concepts with three case studies on
industrial applications in digital libraries, the legal sector and
the telecommunication industry.

Graduate and advanced undergraduate students, academic and
industrial researchers in the field will all find Semantic Web
Technologies an essential guide to the technologies of the
Semantic Web.

About the author

Dr John Davies leads the Next Generation Web research group
at BT. Current interests focus on the application of semantic web
technology to knowledge management and semantic web services. John
is industrial chair of the Semantic Web Services Initiative,
co-organiser of the European Semantic Web Conference series and
Project Director of the SEKT EU integrated project
(Semantically-Enabled Knowledge Technologies). He has written
and edited many papers and books in related areas.

Rudi Studer is Professor at Institute of Applied
Informatics and Formal Description Methods, University of
Karlsruhe. His research spans the fields of business
intelligence, e-learning, knowledge discovery and management,
ontology-based knowledge management systems and the semantic
web. He has authored numerous journal and conference papers
on these topics.

Paul Warren works in BT’s Next Generation Web research
group, where he is SEKT project manager and also responsible for
the project’s exploitation strategy. Paul has published
widely on technology management, technology foresight, and recently
the application of the Semantic Web.