Semantic Web Technology: Recent Successes and Research Challenges

Semantics is seen as the key ingredient in the next phase of the Web infrastructure as well as the next generation of information systems applications. Ontology-driven techniques and systems have already enabled new generation of Semantic Applications in such markets as bioinformatics, financial services, business intelligence, and national security. We begin the talk with a sampling of semantic applications already developed for Enterprises. We review the capabilitiies for creating and maintaining large domain ontologies and automatic semantic metadata extraction that play key role in powering these applications, as well as review key requirements of Enterprise class semantic applications in terms on size and freshness of populated ontologies, content diversity, types of computing involving complex queries and link analysis over ontology instances and metadata, etc. The second part of the talk addresses the research opportunities enabled by the current capabilities described above. Specifically, we discuss our current research agenda in the LSDIS lab for more powerful Semantic Web capabilities related to

• complex relationships discovery (including the SemDis project in which we collaborate with UMBC),
• support for implicit, formal and powerful semantics, and
• Semantic Web Processes.

Background information for this talk can be found at:

• Article in Data Engineering special issue on Making the Semantic Web Real (Dec. 2003)
• Commercial Technology
• Semantic Discovery Projects at UGA and UMBC: SemDis
• Semantics for the Semantic Web: the Implicit, the Formal and the Powerful