How The Semantic Web Works
When creating the semantic web, there are two main questions to be addressed:
- How can we represent knowledge in such a way that it can be understood and processed automatically by a computer?
- Once we have this information, how can we use it effectively in real applications?
Interestingly, the answers to these questions come from very different areas of computing and research. The first is answered by the area of Knowledge Representation, which is the focus of this site. The solution to our second question could come from the field of multi-agent systems.
The Semantic Web envisions not people, but automated agents, as the actual consumers of knowledge. These agents are programs that will collect data from various sources, process this data, and return the information that the user needs. In particular, the Semantic Web requires agents to be able to communicate between themselves and act together to retrieve and process data.