Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems

The Semantic Web is widely accepted as a means to enhance the Web with machine processable content. For making the Semantic Web work in practice it is paramount to be able to use the existing infrastructure, and to enable an evolutionary transition from today’s infrastructure towards a connected web using Semantic Web technologies. Making Semantic Web technology practical has two facets: Making existing technologies work: often useful tricks of the trade are required to make existing systems work with Semantic Web technology. Examples include various mappings of semi-structured data on relational databases or the realization of ontology languages for relational, object-relational, and object-oriented databases. Only these “tricks of the trade” enable to spread Semantic Web technology. Identifying different research assumptions: the existing research in databases is often based on slightly different assumptions than required by Semantic Web technologies. Existing research on semi-structured data storage and retrieval does not take into account that stored data might have heterogeneous semantics, e.g., based on different ontology languages. Based on the identification of different assumptions, new research tasks, based on existing database research, can be identified. Both aspects are critical for the success of the Semantic Web – the first aspect provides necessary solutions for how to make the Semantic Web practical right now, whereas the second aspect indicate the long term research by identifying the different assumptions behind past database research and current Semantic Web needs, and how to bridge the gap between both fields. The workshop provides a forum for both aspects, which did not exist yet.

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