Mission Statement

Currently computers are changing from single isolated devices to entry points in a world wide network of information exchange and business transactions. Therefore, support in data, information, and knowledge exchange becomes the key issue in current computer technology. At the moment, we are on the brink of the second Web generation. The Web started mainly with handwritten HTML pages; then the step were made to machine generated and often active HTML pages. This first generation of the Web were both meant for direct human processing (reading, browsing, form-filling, etc). The second generation Web, that we could call the "Knowledgeable Web", aims at machine processable meaning of information. This coincides with the vision that Tim Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web in his recent book "Weaving the Web", and for which he uses the slogan "Bringing the Web to its full potential" (www.semanticweb.org). The Knowledgeable Web will enable intelligent services such as information brokers, search agents, information filters etc. Ontologies will play a crucial role in enabling the processing and sharing of knowledge between programs on the Web. Onto-logies are generally defined as a "representation of a shared conceptualisation of a particular domain". They provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated across people and application systems.

• An example of the use of ontologies on the Knowledgeable Web is in e-commerce sites where ontologies are needed (a) to enable machine-based communication between buyer and seller, (b) to enable vertical integration of markets (e.g. www.verticalnet.com) (c) to leverage reusable descriptions between different marketplaces.
• A second example of the use of ontologies can be found in search engines. By using ontologies the search engines can escape from the current keyword-based approach, and can find pages that contain syntactically different, but semantically similar words (e.g. www.hotbot.com)

However, a prerequisite for such a role ontologies may play is the development of a joint standard for integrating ontologies with exisiting and arising web standards. The Ontology Inference Layer OIL is a proposal for such a standard. OIL is a Web-based representation and inference layer for ontologies, which combines the widely used modelling primitives from frame-based languages with the formal semantics and reasoning services provided by description logics. Furthermore, OIL is the first ontology representation language that is properly grounded in W3C standards such as RDF/RDF-Schema and XML/XML-Schema.