K4R- Knowledge to the power of RESTful, resourceful and reactive rules

Abstract

The Web of today clearly answers questions of the form "What is the representation of ...?". The Semantic Web (SW) of tomorrow aims at answering questions of the form "What is the meaning of ...?". It is our stance that in order to realize the full potential of the original concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee et al. (in Scientific American,May 2001), the SWmust also answer, in a meaningful way, questions of a dynamic and active nature, like "What to do if ...?" or "What to do when ...?". Moreover, SW questions of the form "What to do ...?" must be expressed and answered in a declarative, compositional and language agnostic way. It is our (hypo)thesis that formally established concepts, viz. the Web's REST architectural style, declarative SW representation of resources based on Description Logics (e.g., OWL-DL), and Reactive Rules (e.g., "on Event if Condition do Action" -ECA- rules), provide the proper theoretical foundations to achieve this goal. This paper describes our current research proposal, K4R (pronounced, with an Italian flavor, "Che fare?"), towards achieving a declarative model for expressing (re)active behavior in and for the SW. © Springer-Verlag 2009.