Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

Semant c E-Bus ness
standardized representations of data structures for processing on heterogeneous
systems without case-by-case programming. The use of XML-based technology,
including ebXML (www.ebxml.org) and RossettaNet (www.RossettaNet.org), allows
for the creation of common vocabularies for e-business to help automate business
processes, allowing better collaboration and knowledge transfer between partners
in semantically integrated systems.
Initiatives to develop technologies for the Semantic Web make the content of the
Web unambiguously computer-interpretable to make it amenable to agent interoperability
and automated reasoning techniques (McIlraith, Son, & Zeng, 2001). RDF
was developed by the W3C as a metadata standard to provide a data model and
syntactical conventions to represent data semantics in a standardized interoperable
manner (McIlraith et al., 2001). The RDF working group also developed RDF
Schema (RDFS), an object-oriented type system that provides an ontology modeling
language. Recently, there have been several efforts to build on RDF and RDFS
with AI-inspired knowledge representation languages such as SHOE, DAML-ONT,
OIL, and DAML+OIL (Fensel, 2000). The Web Ontology Language (OWL) has
been standardized by the W3C as a knowledge representation language for the
Semantic Web. OWL documents represent domain ontologies and rules, and allow
knowledge sharing among agents through the standard Web services architecture.
Web services technology provides the envelope and transport mechanism for information
exchange between software entities. Knowledge exchange architectures use
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP — www.w3.org/TR/soap/) messages to carry
relevant semantic information in the form of OWL documents between agents. The
Web services framework consists of the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL
— www.wsdl.org), which describes Web services in XML format and provides the
basis for tools to create appropriate SOAP messages. These technologies provide
the knowledge representation and exchange mechanism to allow collaborating
organizations to seamlessly share information and knowledge to coordinate e-business
processes.
Ontologies
Description logics (DLs) form a basis for developing ontology to further the sharing
and use of a common understanding of a specific problem. Description logics model
the domain of interest using constructs that describe domain-specific objects and
the relationships between them (Baader et al., 2002). Domain-specific objects are
represented using the concept construct, which is a unary predicate. Relationships
between constructs are represented using the relations construct, which may be an
n-ary predicate. Description logics, at the least, can be used to develop a model of
the domain comprising:
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