Supporting application development in the semantic web

Daniel Oberle, Steffen Staab, Rudi Studer, Raphael Volz

Abstract: The Semantic Web augments the current WWW by giving information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. This is done by adding machine understandable content to Web resources. Such added content is called metadata, whose semantics is provided by referring to an ontology---a domain's conceptualization agreed upon by a community. The Semantic Web relies on the complex interaction of several technologies involving ontologies. Therefore, sophisticated Semantic Web applications typically comprise more than one software module. Instead of coming up with proprietary solutions, developers should be able to rely on a generic infrastructure for application development in this context. We call such an infrastructure Application Server for the Semantic Web whose design and development are based on existing Application Servers. However, we apply and augment their underlying concepts for use in the Semantic Web and integrate semantic technology within the server itself. The article discusses requirements and design issues of such a server, presents our implementation KAON SERVER and demonstrates its usefulness by a detailed scenario.