The Semantic Web is a vision for extending the Web so that machines
can more intelligently integrate and process the wealth of information
that is available. Unlike HTML and ordinary XML, Semantic Web languages
such as SHOE,
DAML+OIL, and
OWL
(a W3C Recommendation),
allow semantics (i.e., meaning) to be explicitly associated
with the content. The semantics are formally specified in ontologies,
which can be shared via the Internet and extended for local needs.
The SWAT lab is at the forefront of Semantic Web research
by studying issues such as interoperability of distributed
ontologies, ontology evolution, and system architectures and tools
for the Semantic Web. See the group's homepage
for details.
This paper describes an algorithm that uses the structure of a rule-goal tree expressing the rewrites of a given query to efficiently locate the relevant sources. It starts with the most selective query nodes, and incrementally loads sources, using the information to refine queries of subsequent sources. Our experiments show that this algorithm can answer many randomly-generated complex queries against 20 million heterogeneous data sources in less than 30 seconds.
This paper introduces our approach to federated queries over numerous, heterogeneously described, Semantic Web sources by extending algorithms from the information integration literature. It presents a formal model of the problem, and demonstrated that the dominant factor in query response time was the time to actually retrieve the sources relevant to the query.
This paper presents an approach to querying the Semantic Web that considers the document-oriented nature of Semantic Web data. It defines queries in which one can ask what is entailed by a given subset of the documents in the knowledge base as well as queries in which one asks for which documents entail specificanswers. It provides algorithms for solving theses problems and describes an experiment in which many of the queries can be answered in miliseconds.
This is the first paper to discuss our attempts to realize the vision of the Semantic Web as a Web-scale query-answering system. We loaded nearly 350,000 real-world semantic web documents that committed to 41,000 ontologies into our DLDB system and then used additional "mapping ontologies" to integrate them. This experiment yielded promising results in that query times ranged from a few milliseconds to 5 seconds.
This is the definitive reference on the Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM) and on empirical evaluation of Semantic Web knowledge base systems in general. This journal article coalesces the results from the ISWC 2003 and ISWC 2004 papers, the latter of which won the best paper award at the conference. In addition, it includes a discussion of preliminary tests on Jena and SPARQL versions of the benchmark queries.
Please do not send me e-mail asking me to evaluate your chances of
admission to the department. I typically do not respond to such requests.
If you are interested in joining my research group, then send me an
e-mail that specifically describes what you would like to do and what prior
qualifications you have. However, I recommend that you read some of my
publications and explore our
current research first. If I think your interests
match our research, then I will contact you for further information.
Semantic Web Resources:
The Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila
The Scientific American article that presents the vision of the Semantic Web.
State of the LOD Cloud
Statistics about the Linked Open Data cloud provided by Freie Universitat Berlin. Linked Open Data is real data in Semantic Web form and is growing daily. Thesestatistics are typically updated once a year.
Semantic Web Case Studies and Use Cases
A continually growing list of applications of Semantic Web technology collected by the W3C. Case studies are actually deployed systems, while use cases are prototype systems.
SemanticWeb.org
A Semantic Wiki for the Semantic Web community. Includes information on tools, ontologies, people, and events.
Semantic Web Activity at W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium's collection of specifications, working groups, and resources related to the Semantic Web.
SemWebCentral
A web site for non-developers to learn about the Semantic Web and for developers to share Semantic Web tools.