Expression of meaning is fundamental to the
construction of the new ???intelligent??? Web. The current Web lacks mechanisms for
expressing meaning and is therefore static. Knowledge representation provides the
mechanism that allows meaning to be expressed in structured format allowing inference
mechanism to be applied to arrive at useful conclusions. To make knowledge
representation both meaningful and practical, the ???meaning??? behind the ???data??? has
to be ???shared.??? This can be accomplished using ontologies. Ontology refers to a
shared vocabulary of some concept. The premise is that if the vocabulary is shared
regarding a concept then the meaning behind the concept becomes apparent among
those sharing the vocabulary. Once the ontology has been agreed upon by a community
and if the ontology can then be captured in machine-readable form using
resource description framework (RDF), RDF schema (RDFS), or Web ontology
language (OWL) then software agents can be used to ???reason??? with the knowledge
represented and captured using that ontology. There may be many such ontologies
in use but by using a global standard such as OWL from the W3C, it is possible to
create many ontologies which are interoperable??”therefore amenable??”to machine
reasoning by software agents.
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