The large-scale and almost ubiquitous availability of information has become as much of a curse as it is a blessing. The more information is available, the harder it is to locate any particular piece of it. And even when it has been successfully found, it is even harder still to usefully combine it with other information we may already possess.
It is commonly understood that this problem of information sharing can only be solved by giving computers better access to the semantics of the information. While it has been recognized that ontologies play a crucial role in solving the open problems, most approaches rely on the existence of well-established data structures. To overcome these shortcomings, Stuckenschmidt and van Harmelen describe ontology-based approaches for resolving semantic heterogeneity in weakly structured environments, in particular the World Wide Web. Addressing problems like missing conceptual models, unclear system boundaries, and heterogeneous representations, they design a framework for ontology-based information sharing in weakly structured environments like the Semantic Web.
For researchers and students in areas related to the Semantic Web, the authors provide not only a comprehensive overview of the State of the art, but also present in detail recent research in areas like ontology design for information integration, metadata generation and management, and representation and management of distributed ontologies. For professionals in areas such as e-commerce and knowledge management, the book provides decision support on the use of novel technologies, information about potential problems, and guidelines for the successful application of existing technologies.
Heiner Stuckenschmidt holds a post-doc position in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he received his PhD for work on Ontology-Based Information Sharing on the Semantic Web. His works include Semantic Web related topics such as ontology languages, knowledge-based meta data management and robust and scalable terminological reasoning. Before moving to Amsterdam, he was employed as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Bremen. His research activities in Bremen included the application of ontologies for information sharing in web based information systems with a special focus on semantics-preserving information integration and spatially related information.
He is organizer of a series of workshops on ontologies at international conferences (IJCAI 01, ECAI 02, IJCAI 03) and member of program committees of several semantic web related conferences (SWWS 01, ISWC 02, WWW 03) and has held / will hold tutorial on the topic of the proposed book at different conferences (K-CAP 2001, IJCAI 03, ISWC 03). He is editor of a book on the application of ontologies in the cadastral domain and has published more than 40 paper in international journals, conferences and workshops.
Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was awarded a PhD from the Department of AI in Edinburgh for his research on meta-level reasoning, after having studied Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. He is author of a book on meta-level inference, editor of a book on knowledge-based systems, editor of a book on Knowledge Management on the Semantic Web, and is currently preparing a text-book on Semantic Web languages. He has published over 100 papers, many of them in leading journals and conferences. He has made key contributions to the CommonKADS project by providing a formal basis for the conceptual models. More recently, he has been co-projectmanager of the On-To-Knowledge project, and was one of the designers of OIL, which (in its form DAML +OIL) is currently the basis for a W3C standardized Web ontology language.
He is a member of the joint EU/US committee on agent markup languages (who designed DAML+OIL), and is an active member of the W3C working group on Web Ontology languages, responsible for the OWL Web Ontology Language. He was the 2002 Program Chair of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and will be the General Chair of the 2004 International Semantic Web Conference.
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