ABSTRACT

The Semantic Web has emerged over the past few years as a realistic option for a worldwide information infrastructure, with its promises of semantic interoperability and serendipitous reuse. In this chapter we analyze the essential ingredients of semantic technologies, what makes them suitable as the foundation for the information infrastructure, and what the alternatives to semantic technologies would be as foundations for the information infrastructure. We will survey the most important achievements on semantic technologies in the past few years, and point to the most important challenges that remain to be solved.