Course overview

The web has become an object of our daily life and the amount of information in the web is ever growing. Besides plain texts, especially multimedia information such as graphics, audio or video have become a predominant part of the web's information traffic. But how can we find useful information within this huge information space? How can we make use of the knowledge contained in those web documents? Traditional search engines for example will reach the limits of their power, when it comes to understanding information content. The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional web in the sense that information in the form of natural language text in the web will be complemented by its explicit semantics based on a formal knowledge representation. Thus, the meaning of information expressed in natural language can be accessed in an automated way and interpreted correctly, i.e. it can be ‘understood’ by machines.