Ontologies, Knowledge Management and Semantic Web at DBIS

The Web provides a simple and universal infrastructure to exchange various kinds of information. In order to share, interpret, and manipulate information worldwide, the role of metadata is widely recognized. Indeed, metadata allow us to easily locate information available in the Web, by providing descriptions about the structure and the content of the various Web resources (eg. data, documents, images, etc.) and for different purposes.

The "Semantic Web", a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, is used to denote the next evolution step of the Web. Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine understandable data would allow automated agents, sophisticated search engines and interoperable services, will enable higher degree of automation and more intelligent applications. The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is to allow machines the sharing and exploitation of knowledge in the Web way, i.e. without central authority, with few basic rules, in a scalable, adaptable, extensible manner. With RDF as the basic platform for the Semantic Web, a multitude of tools, methods and systems have just appeared on the horizon.

With RDF simple ontologies can be defined. The stacks of the Semantic Web pyramid above RDF like Web Ontology Language (OWL) help to build even more expressive ontologies. These ontologies can be used for various applications like: finding information, discovering of new information or integration of information from different sources.

Actual Projects:

We currently concentrate on the useage of ontologies for the integration of data from different sources. In this respect the following activities and resources are worth to be mentioned:

Starting Points:

The RDF specifications and important documents:

Publications (latest on top):

Resources of DBIS:


Tools:



for feedback: Karsten Tolle metadata for this page in rdf

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