HPL is investigating a number of
potential applications for semantic web technology. As well as
helping us understand the scope and limitations of the Semantic
Web vision, these applications also help drive the basic
research and toolkit development. In particular, we use
Jena
to build demonstrators for the case studies, developing
extensions to support the specific applications where necessary.
When these extensions seem to have more general use, they are
added back in to the Jena toolkit.
Demonstrators
Web-logging, typically
abbreviated to "blogging", is a very successful paradigm for
lightweight publishing which has grow sharply in popularity over
the last two years. The notion of semantic
blogging builds upon this success and clear network value of
blogging by adding additional semantic structure to items shared
over the blog channels. In this way we add significant value
allowing navigation and search along semantic rather than simply
chronological or serendipitous connections. As part of our work
on the SWAD-E project, we
created a demonstrator which used semantic blogging for
bibliography management. Appropriately, there is an ongoing
semantic
blog on this and related topics.
The notion of
semantic portals is that a collection of
resources is indexed using a rich domain ontology (as opposed
to, say, a flat keyword list). A portal provides search and
navigation of the underlying resources by exploiting the
structure of this domain ontology. There may be an indirect
mapping between the navigation view provided by the access
portal and the domain semantics - the portal may be reorganized
to suit different user needs while the domain indexes remain
stable and reusable. Semantic Community
Portals comprised a second SWAD-E project
demonstrator and has since formed the basis of both internal and
external applications.
We are interested in the
development of open web-services based on rich, open,
interfaces, and support for dynamic service composition and
autonomous negotiation. Specifically we created a demonstrator
during our SWWS (Semantic Web Web
Services) work to support web services in the procurement
domain.
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External
Applications
We
have deployed semantic web technology for a number of our
partners and customers, primarily as small scale pilots. One
example is a prototype portal to aid students and teachers to
find multi-media content related to the school curriculum. Based
on a rich, extensible ontology modelling, the portal provided a
facetted browse interface that enable users to quickly locate
relevant material. In addition, it demonstrated several novel
user features enabled by the ontology.
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Internal
Applications
We have deployed a number of semantic web applications within
HP, primarily for internal knowledge management. We are also
working on integrating semantic web technology into a number of
HP products.
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