Abstract
The current web is a web of linked pages. Frustrated users search for facts by guessing which keywords or keyword phrases might lead them to pages where they can find facts. Can we make it possible for users to search directly for facts? Equivalently, can we turn the web into a web of facts (instead of a web of pages containing facts)? Ultimately, can the web be a knowledgebase—a web of knowledge—that can provide direct answers to factual questions and also provide the confidence necessary to make those answers believable? We answer these questions by showing how to superimpose a web of data over the web of pages, resulting in a web of knowledge. Our research group at Brigham Young University has been working on this challenge for more than a decade. Our solution, which is based on conceptual modeling, calls for turning raw symbols contained in web pages into knowledge and making this knowledge accessible via the web. The particulars of our solution show ways to overcome three impeding challenges: (1) automatic (or near automatic) creation of ontologies, (2) automatic (or near automatic) annotation of web pages with respect to these ontologies, and (3) simple but accurate query specification, usable without specialized training. Meeting these basic challenges can simplify knowledge-web content creation and access to the point that the vision of a web of knowledge can become a reality. Throughout, we show that conceptual modeling plays a key role in actualizing these ideas.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Al-Kamha, R.: Conceptual XML for Systems Analysis. PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, Department of Computer Science (June 2007)
Al-Muhammed, M.J.: Ontology Aware Software Service Agents: Meeting Ordinary User Needs on the Semantic Web. PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (August 2007)
Al-Muhammed, M.J., Embley, D.W., Liddle, S.W., Tijerino, Y.: Bringing web principles to services: Ontology-based web services. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Semantic Web for Services and Processes (SWSP 2007), Salt Lake City, Utah, pp. 73–80 (2007)
Alhajj, R.: Extracting the extended entity-relationship model from a legacy relational database. Information Systems 28(6), 597–618 (2003)
Baader, F., Nutt, W.: Basic description logics. In: Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P. (eds.) The Description Logic Handbook, ch. 2, pp. 43–95. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Berners-Lee, T.: Future of the world wide web, March 1 (2007), Testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2007/03/01-ushouse-future-of-the-web
Buitelaar, P., Cimiano, P., Loos, B.: Preface. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap Between Text and Knowledge (COLING-ACL 2006), Sydney, Australia (July 2006)
Chiang, R.H.L., Barron, T.M., Storey, V.C.: Reverse engineering of relational databases: Extraction of an EER model from a relational database. Data and Knolwedge Engineering 12(1), 107–142 (1994)
Ding, Y., Embley, D.W., Liddle, S.W.: Automatic creation and simplified querying of semantic web content: An approach based on information-extraction ontologies. In: Mizoguchi, R., Shi, Z.-Z., Giunchiglia, F. (eds.) ASWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4185, pp. 400–414. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Embley, D.W.: NFQL: The natural forms query language. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 14(2), 168–211 (1989)
Embley, D.W., Campbell, D.M., Jiang, Y.S., Liddle, S.W., Lonsdale, D.W., Ng, Y.-K., Smith, R.D.: Conceptual-model-based data extraction from multiple-record web pages. Data & Knowledge Engineering 31(3), 227–251 (1999)
Embley, D.W., Kurtz, B.D., Woodfield, S.N.: Object-oriented Systems Analysis: A Model-Driven Approach. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1992)
Embley, D.W., Zitzelberger, A.: Theoretical foundations for enabling a web of knowledge. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2010), Sophia, Bulgaria, pp. 211–229 (February 2010)
Fellbaum, C.: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Footnote.com (2007), http://www.footnote.com
Gruber, T.R.: A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowledge Acquisition 5(2), 199–220 (1993)
Guarino, N.: Formal ontologies and information systems. In: Guarino, N. (ed.) Proceedings of the First International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 1998), Trento, Italy, pp. 3–15 (June 1998)
Halpin, T.: Conceptual Schema & Relational Database Design, 2nd edn. Prentice Hall of Australia Pty. Ltd., Sydney (1995)
Jarrar, M.: Towards automated reasoning on ORM schemes. In: Parent, C., Schewe, K.-D., Storey, V.C., Thalheim, B. (eds.) ER 2007. LNCS, vol. 4801, pp. 181–197. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Lammari, N., Comyn-Wattiau, I., Akoka, J.: Extracting generalization hierarchies from relational databases: A reverse engineering approach. Data & Knowledge Engineering 63(2), 568–589 (2007)
Lynn, S.: Automating mini-ontology generation from canonical tables. Master’s thesis, Department of Computer Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (2008)
Rus, V.: A first evaluation of logic form identification systems. In: Mihalcea, R., Edmonds, P. (eds.) Senseval-3: Third International Workshop on the Evaluation of Systems for the Semantic Analysis of Text, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 37–40 (March 2004)
Sirin, E., Parsia, B., Grau, B.C., Kalyanpur, A., Katz, Y.: A practical OWL-DL reasoner. Journal of Web Semantics 5(2), 51–53 (2007)
Smith, B.: Ontology. In: Floridi, L. (ed.) Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, pp. 155–166. Blackwell, Oxford (2003)
Tao, C.: Ontology Generation, Information Harvesting and Semantic Annotation for Machine-Generated Web Pages. PhD dissertation, Brigham Young University, Department of Computer Science (December 2008)
Tijerino, Y.A., Embley, D.W., Lonsdale, D.W., Ding, Y., Nagy, G.: Toward ontology generation from tables. World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems 8(3), 261–285 (2005)
Vickers, M.: Ontology-based free-form query processing for the semantic web. Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (June 2006)
OWL Web Ontology Language Reference Manual. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref
Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), http://www.w3.org/RDF
SPARQL Query Language for RDF. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Embley, D.W., Liddle, S.W., Tao, C. (2011). A Web of Knowledge: A Conceptual-Modeling Perspective. In: Kaschek, R., Delcambre, L. (eds) The Evolution of Conceptual Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6520. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17505-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17505-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17504-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17505-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)