Converting and Integrating Vocabularies for the Semantic Web

Schreiber, A.T. [Promotor]Ossenbruggen, J.R. van [Copromotor

Conversion of WordNet to a standard RDF/OWL representation

This paper presents an overview of the work in progress at the W3C to produce a standard conversion of WordNet to the RDF/OWL representation language in use in the Semantic Web community. Such a standard representation is useful to provide application developers a high-quality resource and to promote interoperability. Important requirements in this conversion process are that it should be complete and should stay close to WordNet’s conceptual model. The paper explains the steps taken to produce the conversion and details design decisions such as the composition of the class hierarchy and properties, the addition of suitable OWL semantics and the chosen format of the URIs. Additional topics include a strategy to incorporate OWL and RDFS semantics in one schema such that both RDF(S) infrastructure and OWL infrastructure can interpret the information correctly, problems encountered in understanding the Prolog source files and the description of the two versions that are provided (Basic and Full) to accommodate different usages of WordNet. 1

MultimediaN E-Culture Demonstrator

The main objective of the MultimediaN E-Culture project is to demonstrate how novel semantic-web and presentation technologies can be deployed to provide better indexing and search support within large virtual collections of cultural-heritage resources. The architecture is fully based on open web standards, in particular XML, SVG, RDF/OWL and SPARQL. One basic hypothesis underlying this work is that the use of explicit background knowledge in the form of ontologies/vocabularies/thesauri is in particular useful in information retrieval in knowledge-rich domains