Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

PART II

WEB ONTOLOGY AND LOGIC

Before we can achieve anything approaching artificial intelligence or ‘thinking’ on the Web, the next-generation Web architecture must be able to support the basic elements of logic and automation.

In Part II, we present Web Ontology and Logic: the solution of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to deliver Semantic Web architecture built upon layers of open markup languages. The Semantic Web will support machine-processing capabilities that will automate Web applications and services. Berners-Lee has suggested that Web technologies would benefit from integration of the Semantic Web’s meaningful content with Web Services’ business logic.¹

For the Semantic Web to provide intelligent features and capabilities, it will have to trade off the expressive power of new logic languages against the computational complexity of processing large semantic networks. The layered language approach of the W3C seeks to implement a balanced approach toward building the Semantic Web.

Agents on the Semantic Web will perform tasks by seeking information from Web resources while communicating with other Web agents. Agents are simply pieces of software that work autonomously and proactively. In most cases, agents will simply collect and organize information by utilizing metadata, ontologies, and logic.

Chapter 5 begins our presentation of Semantic Web markup languages by introducing Resource Description Framework (RDF). Chapter 6 describes the Web Ontology Language (OWL). ...