Introduction

Abstract

In the most recent years, the Semantic Web has become a most promising research field, which tries to automate and support sharing and reuse of the data and metadata representing the growing amount of digital information available to our society. The underlying idea of having a description of the data on the Web, in such a way that it can be employed by machines for automation, integration and reuse across various applications, has been exploited in several research fields. However, the gigantic amount of such useful information makes more and more difficult its efficient management, undermining the possibility to transform it into useful knowledge. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.