The Semantic Web: a Meaningful Habitat for Agents
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The Semantic Web: a meaningful habitat for Agents? Frank van Harmelen and Zhisheng Huang Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract The vision of a more semantic Web, and the research issues following from that vision have made much progress in recent years. However,until now, and rather contrary to the original vision, many of theapplication scenario's are highly client/server oriented, withsemantically rich centralised repositories serving to clients who only consume this information. Gradually, more attention is being given to scenario's where semantically rich clients interact directly with each other, without intervention of a centralised server. Such scenario's are of course very close to the agent-style paradigm. In this talk, we will first give a brief survey of the current state of the Semantic Web research programme. We will then focus on the opportunities that the Semantic Web offers for agent-style computation, and we will survey the most important research issues that will have to be faced in order to make this a reality. In the second part of this talk, we will discuss one of these challenges in detail, in particular we will survey work on reasoning with multi-version ontologies by a temporal logic approach.
Biography Frank van Harmelen (1960) is professor of Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studied mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam. In 1989, he was awarded a PhD from the Department of AI in Edinburgh for his research on meta-level reasoning. After his PhD research, he moved back to Amsterdam where he was involved in the REFLECT project on the use of reflection in expert systems, and in the KADS project, where he contributed to the development of the (ML)2 language for formally specifying Knowledge-Based Systems. In 1995 he joined the AI research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he is heading the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group. He was an active member of the W3C working group which designed the Web Ontology Language OWL, and has published the first textbook on the Semantic Web. He is author of a number of books, and has published over 75 research papers.
Dr. Zhisheng Huang (http://wasp.cs.vu.nl/~huang) is a senior researcher in the Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences Vrije University of Amsterdam. He is the principal investigator of the work tasks on reasoning with inconsistent ontologies and reasoning with multi-version ontologies of the EU funded SEKT project(http://sekt.semanticweb.org/). He studied computer science in Harbin for his bachelor degree and master degree. He was awarded a PhD in 1994 for his research on logics for agents with bounded rationality at Applied Logic Laboratory (http://www.ccsom.uva.nl/), Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)