Semantic authoring and semantic computing

Abstract

Semantic Computing is to design and operate information systems based on meaning and vocabulary shared by people and computers. It aims at closing the semantic gap, thus enabling closer cooperation between people and information systems, and thereby semantically enriching our life-world. Ontologies and constraints are major technologies to let people and information systems share common meaning. Semantic authoring is to compose information content together with explicit semantic structure based on ontologies. This not only reduces the cost of content composition but also improves the quality of the resulting content, by both freeing the author from worries about the order of presentation and providing her a perspicuous view of the logical content structure. Social interactions are much more generally modelled in terms of constraints than in terms of workflows or procedures. CBTO (compositional business-task organization) is a constraint-based framework to concisely describe uniformities of social interactions and thus provides a semantic-level scheme for coordinating various, possibly interactive, services with each other. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.