SemCode2: Ontology-Based Annotation and Transcoding

Katashi NAGAO

Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University

1 Introduction

The Semantic Web as a next generation information infrastructure for knowledge sharing requires some tools and platforms to create and distribute semantically extended Web content.We have been developing such system that has almost same functions as theSemantic Web along the straight line of an extension of the current Web.We call our framework ``Semantic Transcoding'' because one of our main purposesis to trancode (personalize or adapt) Web content into more appropriatepresentation format using semantic information about the content.This framework consists of the following three subsystems:

Based on our experiences on development of these systems, I would liketo recommend what and how we should do for building an instance of the Semantic Web as early as possible.

2 Critical Issues in Semantic Annotation

The Semantic Web aims at a global knowledge sharing infrastructure. However, it is too challenging to realize itswhole functionality along with the plan.Artificial intelligence and knowledge management researchers have beentried to create a general methodology for universal knowledge representationbut failed.How we

I guess that there are some critical issues of the ``current (planned)'' Semantic Web.The examples are as follows:

Language specifications of the components of the Semantic Web such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) are too complicated to learn.
Literacy building for metadata authoring is not yet establishedand ordinary users are not well motivated to create metadata.
No concrete applications are proposed in detail except semantic retrievalof content.

Below I discuss some practical solutions for the above issues.Key concepts include a hierarchization of information based on annotations and an individualization of information via transcoding.We employ XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a basic framework of interoperability of structured information.

An extension of present Web that is realized by annotation and transcodingin terms of its content and usage is also a realization of the SemanticWeb

3 Ontology-Based Annotation

3.1 Ontology Editor

3.2 Authoring Process of Ontology Creation

4 Ontology-Based Transcoding

4.1 Process of Transcoding

5 Further Issues

References

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[2] Heflin, J. and J. Hendler, Semantic Interoperability on the Web, Proceedings of Extreme Markup Langueges 2000, 2000

[3] Ryuichiro Higashinaka and Katashi Nagao, Interactive Paraphrasing Based on Linguistic Annotation, Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-02), pp.1218-1222, 2002

[4] Madche, A. and S. Staab, Mining Ontologies from Text, Proceedings of the European Knowledge Acquisition Workshop (EKAW-2000), 2000

[5] Miller, G., WordNet: A lexical database for English, Communications of the ACM, Vol.38, No.11, pp.39-41, 1995

[6] Katashi Nagao, Yoshinari Shirai, and Kevin Squire, Semantic Annotation and Transcoding: Making Web Content More Accessible, IEEE MultiMedia, Vol.8, No.2, pp.69-81, 2001

[7] TopicMaps.Org, XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0, http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/index.html, 2001

[8] W3C, Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/, 2002

[9] W3C, The Semantic Web Community Portal, http://www.semanticweb.org/, 2002

[11] 日本電子化辞書研究所, EDR電子化辞書, http://www.iijnet.or.jp/edr/J_index.html, 2002