Today we are part of a complex knowledge driven society where access and usage of information had become a crucial part of your everyday’s life. Thanks to the enormous progress of computer science and especially of the creation of the world wide web (WWW) we have now access to more information than ever before in human history. Today scientist, industry and even the casual user understood now very well that making information easy and fast accessible in the WWW is simply not enough. The key question is rather: How the knowledge hidden inside these available heterogeneous information resources can be identified, structured and made retrievable. The author John Naisbitt expressed it: “We drown in information but thirst for knowledge”.Λ

As a result we must note that the way we are currently managing knowledge is flagrantly unsuitable for the vital role it must fulfil in our society. As a result of this, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee already developed in 2002 a vision of the „Semantic Webs“ as an extension of the current WWW. The main objective of this semantic web is to make information usable for computer systems in a meaning full way. Not only humans but also computer systems should be able to find, collect, share and interpret relevant knowledge aspects automatically. Such “intelligent” computer system could support us in managing knowledge in order to regain control of the overall information glut.

However, today we are still far away from implementing the semantic web vision of Berners-Lee. We have access to powerful knowledge modelling languages (e.g. RDF, OWL, Topic Maps) but how to apply them for real life problems is still challenging. Pragmatic guidelines, sophisticated tools for designing, creation and sharing ontologies, for visualising ontologies are still too rare and not mature enough to solve the emergent WWW problems. In my research and teaching I have undertaken to explore these questions and to develop solution in order to enlarge our understanding of fundamental problems and possible solutions.

Experiment on Ontology Mapping Evaluation                                         (UPDATED LINK)                           Please click here to start the experiment ...

To get in touch with me, please contact me

• via e-mail: hendriktho(at)gmail.com