Nowadays, how to
process and exchange semantic information becomes very important. Semantic Web
and e-business are two important applications which need to process the semantic
information. Semantic Web (Lee, 1999) means that the Web pages are annotated
with the concepts (terms and relationships) from sharing ontologies; because Web
information refers to the sharing ontologies, computers can automatically understand
and process the semantic information. Similarly, when different partners (agents)
of e-business refer to the sharing concepts in ontologies, they can semantically
communicate with each other. This is a semantic e-business which is different from
the traditional e-business. To process the semantic information, the traditional ebusiness
is a person-to-person communication; now with ontologies the semantic
communication of e-business partners is an agent-to-agent communication.
It can be seen that ontologies play a core role in processing semantic information.
An ontology defines the basic terms and relationships comprising the vocabulary
of a topic area, as well as the rules for combining terms and relationships to define
extensions to the vocabulary (Gruber, 1993).
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