Can we ever catch up with the Web?

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Polleres, Axel^; | Hogan, Aidan | Harth, Andreas | Decker, Stefan

Affiliations: Digital Enterprise Research Institute – DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. E-mail: aidan.hogan@deri.org, stefan.decker@deri.org | Institut of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods – AFIB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. E-mail: harth@kit.edu

Note: [] Corresponding author. E-mail: axel.polleres@deri.org.

Abstract: The Semantic Web is about to grow up. By efforts such as the Linking Open Data initiative, we finally find ourselves at the edge of a Web of Data becoming reality. Standards such as OWL 2, RIF and SPARQL 1.1 shall allow us to reason with and ask complex structured queries on this data, but still they do not play together smoothly and robustly enough to cope with huge amounts of noisy Web data. In this paper, we discuss open challenges relating to querying and reasoning with Web data and raise the question: can the burgeoning Web of Data ever catch up with the now ubiquitous HTML Web?

Keywords: Web of data, reasoning, querying, rules, ontologies, RDF, OWL2, SPARQL, RIF

DOI: 10.3233/SW-2010-0016

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 1, no. 1-2, pp. 45-52, 2010