Thanks to the efforts made on technologies based on Description Logics, it is possible to realize software applications with
reasoning capacities.
The application scenario is very broad and interesting. Traditional information systems usually
manage “facts” treated by application’s proprietary functions. These facts are collected in Data Bases and document repositories.
Information is extracted with methods and techniques suitable to the specific application field, and the knowledge is acquired
directly by users via direct analysis of information.
Through the semantic technologies it is already possible to
automatically extract knowledge from facts collected by traditional informative systems.
This is a new outlook in computing never before imagined.
Structured data
Semantic technologies are ideal for the treatment of structured information. That’s why standardized technologies and languages
such as OWL and RDF are built on XML.
Adaptive navigation systems, semantic search engines and automatic systems for
content updating are some of the possible applications for these technologies which are particularly suitable for the treatment
of information coming from an XML based Web site.
Some examples of solutions developed by Epistematica are:
- EPISURF is an ontology navigator RacerPro® based that returns
instances in Web format.
Data base
As the process of extracting knowledge from unstructured information can benefit from the power of Description Logics, so this
power greatly increases in the case of formatted information, usually stored in relational Data Bases accessible via SQL,
and so the affordance and power of the whole information system increases.
The expressive power of Description Logics,
together with automatic reasoning, offer a computational power to SQL engines unprecedented in the history of Informatics.
The application field is very broad. Automatic reasoning can be used for realizing decision support systems, for connecting events,
for integrating data, for applied cooperation, for matchmaking etc.
Epistematica developed solutions such as:
- ADYTON, a semantic system, for direct access to relational databases, based on QuOnto®
technology.
Document repository
The realization of the Semantic Web as originally envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee currently seems a utopia.
Probably it
will take many years before millions of producers of billions of pages presented on the Web decide to migrate in the direction
of more expressive languages than HTML. Maybe producers of information collecting text documents for years will never consider
it convenient to convert such documents in a well-structured format for treating them with semantic technologies.
For these
reasons the syntactic approach seems to be the only way for treating information dispersed in free text.
Nevertheless,
semantic technologies can help text retrieval and text mining technologies, in order to design and realize more effective
information systems.
As the use of Description Based technologies allow the adoption of a more abstract approach to
problems, deductive reasoning will also enable the automation of repetitive processes which would otherwise be exclusively
delegated humans.
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