Lift off for the Semantic Web
The World Wide Web has become a standard feature of daily life. Researchers from the WONDERWEB project predict that the latest development to the Web, known as the Semantic Web, will be just as revolutionary and successful. At present data stored on the Web is primarily for use by humans. However, the aim of the Semantic Web is to provide data that can also be processed by machines. This can enable a whole spectrum of intelligent services, providing users with much more sophisticated searching and browsing capabilities. Central to this advance in the Web's potential is the development of ontologies. Ontologies are meta data and provide a controlled set of terms, each one with a precisely defined meaning which can be processed by machine. The use of ontologies is intended to allow human beings and machines to communicate more effectively. The result will enable content-based access and interoperability raising communication across the Web to a new level. The WONDERWEB researchers developed the extraction tool OntoLiFT which semi-automatically extracts lightweight ontologies from legacy resources such as XML. Schema languages Document Type Definition (DTD) and XML Schema (W3C) were included. Focussing on the most important languages means that these existing information systems can still serve a vital role in web services.