On the emergent semantic web and overlooked issues

Abstract

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lot of attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives' paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues. © Springer-Verlag 2004.