Ontobroker: Ontology Based Access to the WWW

Rudi Studer
Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany on sabbatical at the InfoLab, Stanford University

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is currently one of the most important electronic information sources. However, its query functionality and the provided reasoning services are rather limited.

Ontobroker consists of a number of languages and tools that enhance query access and inference service in the WWW. It provides languages to annotate Web documents with ontological information, to represent ontologies and to formulate queries based on these ontologies. Ontobroker allows to access directly the Web information you are interested in and to infer new knowledge with an inference engine based on techniques from logic programming. This talk uses examples from the 'Knowledge Annotation Initiative of the Knowledge Acquisition Community' to illustrate these languages and tools and the kind of services that are provided.

The Ontobroker system is available on the Web.

The Ontobroker system was developed jointly with Stefan Decker, Michael Erdmann and Dieter Fensel.

Biography

From January 1977 to June 1985 Rudi Studer worked as a research scientist at the University of Stuttgart. From July 1985 till October 1989 he was project leader and manager at IBM Germany Scientific Centre, Institute of Knowledge Based Systems. Since November 1989 he has been full professor in Applied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe. He received his Doctor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart in 1982. His research interests include Knowledge Engineering, Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Knowledge Management.