ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explain the basic motivations and ideas underlying Semantic Web technologies as presented in this book, along with some of the history of these ideas. This gentle introduction prepares the stage for the more technical parts that are covered in subsequent chapters. From its very beginnings, the development of Semantic Web technologies
has been closely related to the World Wide Web. This is is not surprising, given that the inventor of the WWW – Sir Tim Berners-Lee – has originally coined the term “Semantic Web” and has inspired much research in this area. Important goals of the approaches that are described in this book are indeed very similar to the goals of the Web in general: to make knowledge widely accessible and to increase the utility of this knowledge by enabling advanced applications for searching, browsing, and evaluation. And, similar to the traditional Web, the foundation of Semantic Web technologies are data formats that can be used to encode knowledge for processing (relevant aspects of it) in computer systems, although the focus is on different forms of knowledge. However, viewing the WWW as the only origin and inspiration for the
technologies that are described in this book would not do justice to their true history. More importantly, it would also hide some of the main motivations that have led to the technologies in their present form. To avoid such a narrow perspective in this chapter, two further strands of closely related endeavors are explained here. One is the general approach of building abstract models that capture the complexities of the world in terms of simpler ideas. Modeling in this sense pervades human history – a comprehensive historic account is beyond the scope of this book – but underlying methods and motivations are highly relevant for the semantic technologies that are available for us today. A second, more recent approach is the idea of computing with knowledge.
The vision of representing knowledge in a way that allows machines to automatically come to reasonable conclusions, maybe even to “think,” has been a driving force for decades of research and development, long before the WWW was imagined. Again, a brief look at this line of development helps us to understand some of the motivations and ideas behind the technologies presented in this book. Thus we arrive at the following three main topics that provide conceptual underpinnings for the Semantic Web:
