The Semantic Web is a vision of the future of the World Wide Web where machines (automated systems) can do more meaningful processing. Current Web content, produced mostly for human consumption, does not lend itself well for automated processing. Instead, human interpretation is needed to make sense (and meaningful use) of Web pages and information contained therein.
The current approach to making the Web more amenable to automation and automated processing involves the application of Knowledge Representation (KR) techniques to Web content. The use of ontologies and logical reasoning will enable qualitatively more flexible automation that would otherwise be possible, but at the same time presents us with a new set of challenges, as traditional KR techniques were not constructed for distributed use and often assumed complete and consistent information (distributed, loosely coupled nature and the ability to deal with incomplete and inconsistent information, coincidentally, are characteristics that make the World Wide Web so successful).
Current efforts to create (and standardize) technologies for the Semantic Web are being spearheaded by the World Wide Web Consortium. Standards that have already been completed include the following:
Work is underway to define additional components for the Semantic Web architecture, namely
All these formalisms build on the existing Web architecture, specifically they use XML as the syntactic basis and URIs for identifying and addressing things.
Nokia maintains a long-standing Semantic Web research and development activity. We view the Semantic Web technology as transending the Web itself. In many ways, technologies developed for the Semantic Web are a powerful means to achieving interoperability between virtual and physical systems. As such, we believe the Semantic Web holds the key to full realization of Ubiquitous Computing (as the next big paradigm of personal computing).
Nokia Research Center has been involved in the Semantic Web research before the coining of the term "Semantic Web" and co-contributed to the creation of this research area. We have made contributions to all significant Semantic Web standards. We have co-authored the key standards and articles defining the Semantic Web as we now know it. The following publications and/or standards were all co-authored by Nokia Research Center personnel:
We have also created our own open-source toolkit, Wilbur, for building Semantic Web applications as well as the Nokia Semantic Web Server which provides access to metadata describing Nokia's products, documents, vocabularies, schemas, and other resources.
Our current Semantic Web efforts are very much focused on enabling better ubiquitous and mobile computing experience. Specifically, the use of Semantic Web technologies to not only improved interoperability of ubiqutious computing systems but also to some specific hard problems therein, such as context awareness and "policy-awareness", both of which not only we feel are prerequisites for fully implementing ubiquitous computing environments and systems but also lend themselves well for application of an "ontological approach".
Some of our current Semantic Web research efforts are conducted in collaboration with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
