The Semantic Web extends the current state of the Web with well-defined meaning. We advocate the use of ontological hypertext as an application of the Semantic Web to provide a principled and structured approach to navigating the resources on the Web. This paper demonstrates how we have applied this concept to two real-world scenarios

Carr, Les

Hall, Wendy

Kampa, Simon

Miles-Board, Timothy

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

Hypertext in the Semantic WebTimothy Miles-Board, Simon Kampa, Leslie Carr, Wendy Hall{tmb99r, srk98r, lac, wh}@ecs.soton.ac.ukIAM Research Lab, University of Southampton, UKABSTRACTThe Semantic Web extends the current state of the Web withwell-deﬁned meaning. We advocate the use of ontologicalhypertext as an application of the Semantic Web to providea principled and structured approach to navigating the re-sources on the Web. This paper demonstrates how we haveapplied this concept to two real-world scenarios.KEYWORDS: Semantic Web, Ontological Hypertext, Nav-igation, OntologiesINTRODUCTIONOntology is the study of “things that exist”. A formal modelthat allows reasoning over concepts and objects that appearin the real world.Hypermedia is the study of “what can be said” using com-puter media, databases and links. Hypermedia provides com-puter mediated extensions to familiar textual communica-tion. This is important because real-world objects, or the“things that exist”, have complex relationships, and so com-plexstructuresarerequiredforexpressingandexploringtheserelations when we make hypermedia statements about them.Ontological hypertext is then the kind of hypertext whosestructureandlinksarederivedfromtherelationshipsbetweenobjects in the real world. It enables us to effectively answerqueries using a “query by linking” approach (as opposed tothe more traditional “query by searching”), using facts thatwe are able to assert in order to discover new knowledgethrough exploration.SCENARIO: USING THE WEB FOR RESEARCHTheWebhasbecomeapopularpublishingmediumforschol-ars in many ﬁelds [3] and is gradually turning us into e-Scholars. Thereasonsforthistransformationcanbeattributedto the actions of primary and secondary publishers placingtheir archives online and adapting to e-commerce opportuni-ties, as well as the actions of researchers themselves in usingtheWebtoextendpublicaccesstotheirwork. Indeed, thepo-tential advantages the Web has to offer the scholar are easy toenumerate: instantaneous and interlinked access to the entireresearch literature and its surrounding resources.E-scholars not only publish their research results on the Web,increasingly they also use the Web for research, a process ofsystematic investigation and collection of information rele-vant to their research speciality. Currently, this process re-quires detective work (What did the author of this paper goon to write? What other papers describe this project? Didthis work inﬂuence any standards or other software?) be-cause the literature is disconnected from itself and from therecords and reports of the research activities which producedit. In fact, the Web seldom exhibits associatively connectedhypermediatoitsmaximumpotential[1]. Evenwithindigitallibraries the ability to locate scholarly information requiresan efﬁcient search engine that provides comprehensive re-sults, but remains ﬂexible enough to satisfy a researcher’srequest.Ideally, what is required is a semantic hyper-web of schol-arly information that encapsulates the knowledge required tobecome thoroughly immersed in one’s research ﬁeld.EXAMPLEWe applied the ontological hypertext principle to two schol-arly scenarios. OntoPortal [5], a project funded by the De-fense Evalulation and Research Agency (DERA), UK, andthe E-Scholar Knowledge Inference Model (ESKIMO) [4]project based at the IAM Research Lab, Southampton, UK.OntoPortal projects intelligently interlinked hypertext over aresearch domain, and has been applied to modelling the lat-est research in metadata. An ontology identiﬁes the concepts(e.g. literature, organisation, standard) and relations (e.g. lit-erature discusses a standard) within this domain. The On-toPortal system then enforces this ontological structure overthis domain to provide principled and intelligent navigationof the knowledge.Figure 1 illustrates how a researcher can realize the query,Whichresearchersarebasedinthesameteamasthisproject?,quicklyand effectively byexploring thenow explicit linkthatexists between projects and research teams. In Figure 1 thescholar brings up a list of all projects (1) and selects a rele-vant one (2). To learn more about the team responsible forPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.HT'01 8/01 Aarhus, Denmark® 2001 ACM ISBN 1-59113-420-7/01/0008…$5.00237Figure 1: OntoPortal Screenshotthe project, the link to the research team is selected. Amongother related concepts, all researchers based at that researchteam are presented (3). A graphical representation (4) of theontology is always provided to act as a navigational cue.While OntoPortal illustrates the concept of “query by link-ing”, ESKIMO fully utilises the primary advantage of the Se-mantic Web: analysing ontological knowledge to infer newfacts. The ontology used in ESKIMO models the generalacademic community and represents an evolution of the On-toPortalontology, beingmoreliterature-orientedwithagreateremphasis on producing and analysing research. ESKIMOalso augments traditional scholarly analysis tools (e.g. bib-liometrics, citation analysis) by drawing on this ontologi-cal knowledge. The combination of ontological hypertext asseen in OntoPortal and the inferencing mechanism enablesintricate research queries, such as the following, to be for-mulated.• What other adaptive hypermedia papers has this researchteam produced?• Who are the experts in hypertext?• What are the seminal papers in metadata research?• Which papers discuss the application of theoretical modelsand hypertext?• What impact has this project had?• What trends can be identiﬁed in agent systems from 1990to 1995?Figure2demonstratesaresearcherviewinginformationabouta particular literature, and then requesting a list of (inferred)experts within the research ﬁeld that the literature addresses.Further work is being undertaken to identify the most usefulknowledge inferences to encapsulate as links and the mostFigure 2: ESKIMO Screenshotuseful source anchors on which to site those links [2].CONCLUDING REMARKSWe have used two example scenarios to demonstrate how us-ing ontologies together with hypertext as an application ofthe Semantic Web can enhance the Web and provide a prin-cipled and structured approach to navigating and uncoveringrelated information.REFERENCES1. Carr, L., Hall, W., and Miles-Board, T., Writing andReading Web Hypermedia, Technical Report ECSTR-IAM00-1, Electronics and Computer Science Depart-ment, University of Southampton, 2000.2. Carr, L., Hall, W., Bechhofer, S., and Goble, G., Con-ceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia,in Proc. 10th International WWW Conference, (HongKong, May 1-5, 2001), 334-342.3. Harnad, S., Electronic Scholarly Publication: QuoVadis? Serials Review 21, 1 (1995), 70-72, Reprintedin Managing Information 2, 3 (1995).4. Kampa, S., Carr, L., Web Scholars, in Poster Proc. 9thInternational WWW Conference, (Amsterdam, May2000), 44-45.5. Kampa, S., Miles-Board, T., Carr, L., and Hall, W.,Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext forScholars, Technical Report ECSTR-IAM01-005, Elec-tronics and Computer Science Department, Universityof Southampton, 2001.238

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia, in

Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis?

Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext for Scholars,

Scholars, in Poster

Writing and Reading Web Hypermedia,

Hypertext in the Semantic Web

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.8115

Hypertext in the Semantic Web

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