Kei-Hoi Cheung – författare

The rapid growth of the Web has led to the proliferation of information sources and content accessible via the Internet. While improvements in hardware capabilities continue to help the speed and the flow of information across networked computers, there remains a major problem for the human user to keep up with the rapid expansion of the Web information space. Although there is plenty of room for computers to help humans to discover, navigate, and integrate information in this vast information space, the way the information is currently represented and structured through the Web is not easily readable to computers. To address this issue, the Semantic Web has emerged. It envisions a new information infrastructure that enables computers to better address the information needs of human users. To realize the Semantic Web vision, a number of standard technologies have been developed. These include the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) for identifying objects in the Web space as well as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) for encoding knowledge in the form of standard machine-readable ontologies. The goal is to migrate from the syntactic Web of documents to the semantic Web of ontologies. The leading organization for facilitating, developing, and promoting these Web-based standards is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www. w3. org).

The rapid growth of the Web has led to the proliferation of information sources and content accessible via the Internet. While improvements in hardware capabilities continue to help the speed and the flow of information across networked computers, there remains a major problem for the human user to keep up with the rapid expansion of the Web information space. Although there is plenty of room for computers to help humans to discover, navigate, and integrate information in this vast information space, the way the information is currently represented and structured through the Web is not easily readable to computers. To address this issue, the Semantic Web has emerged. It envisions a new information infrastructure that enables computers to better address the information needs of human users. To realize the Semantic Web vision, a number of standard technologies have been developed. These include the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) for identifying objects in the Web space as well as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) for encoding knowledge in the form of standard machine-readable ontologies. The goal is to migrate from the syntactic Web of documents to the semantic Web of ontologies. The leading organization for facilitating, developing, and promoting these Web-based standards is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www. w3. org).

The rapid growth of the Web has led to the proliferation of information sources and content accessible via the Internet. While improvements in hardware capabilities continue to help the speed and the flow of information across networked computers, there remains a major problem for the human user to keep up with the rapid expansion of the Web information space. Although there is plenty of room for computers to help humans to discover, navigate, and integrate information in this vast information space, the way the information is currently represented and structured through the Web is not easily readable to computers. To address this issue, the Semantic Web has emerged. It envisions a new information infrastructure that enables computers to better address the information needs of human users. To realize the Semantic Web vision, a number of standard technologies have been developed. These include the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) for identifying objects in the Web space as well as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) for encoding knowledge in the form of standard machine-readable ontologies. The goal is to migrate from the syntactic Web of documents to the semantic Web of ontologies. The leading organization for facilitating, developing, and promoting these Web-based standards is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www. w3. org).

The Semantic Web has been a very important development in how knowledge is disseminated and manipulated on the Web, but it has been of particular importance to the flow of scientific knowledge, and will continue to shape how data is stored and accessed in a broad range of disciplines, including life sciences, earth science, materials science, and the social sciences. After first presenting papers on the foundations of semantic e-science, including papers on scientific knowledge acquisition, data integration, and workflow, this volume looks at the state of the art in each of the above-mentioned disciplines, presenting research on semantic web applications in the life, earth, materials, and social sciences. Drawing papers from three semantic web workshops, as well as papers from several invited contributors, this volume illustrates how far semantic web applications have come in helping to manage scientific information flow.