Semantic Web services with SOUL

Abstract

Semantic Web Services should make it easier for a user to find the needed information on Web by using natural language queries, instead of simple keywords like in search engines. It has been widely recognized that the main problem in the implementation of this idea is the problem of semantic representation, the same problem that AI researchers were trying to solve for a long time. Various ontology and schema languages are used in Semantic Web to represent the semantics of Web pages, but they require an extensive effort to translate the existing Web pages. We propose a new knowledge representation technique, so called Hierarchical Semantic Form, together with a supporting SOUL algorithm, which should provide a rudimentary understanding of existing, non-annotated Web pages, thus eliminating the need for their laborious translation. As an example we have implemented a prototype Semantic Web Service that gives information about flights stored in an ordinary Web page. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.