Plenary talk: Semantic Web: Issues and challenges

The current day World Wide Web (WWW) is a web of documents interlinked by navigable hyperlinks. It has no doubt changed the way information is disseminated or exchanged and gave rise to a host of powerful applications which are hard to live without in our times. However, while the current day web is excellent for humans to browse and understand and assimilate information, it is not easy for software agents to operate with. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) framework has helped to an extent by enabling the process of defining new markup languages with domain-specific tags that can be used to annotate information. However, XML does not allow description of the domain by making precise statements about it. A set of new frameworks such as OWL-DL, OWL have been standardized by the W3C for the purpose of capturing knowledge of a domain in a machine processable manner. It is hoped that these frameworks would enable us to move towards the Semantic Web where more of the semantics of the domains we deal with are captured in a machine processable manner leading us to smarter use of information. The talk would introduce the elements of the Semantic Web technology to the audience.