This sub-section provides an overview of the various Semantic Web application domains that exist today, as well as potential future application areas.
2.2.2.1 Semantic E-Business
The following areas of e-business are widely reported in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) literature as most likely to benefit by future adoption of Semantic Web technologies:
• Supply Chain Management (SCM) - Described by Poirer & Bauer (2001), as a
common strategy employed by businesses to improve organizational processes to optimize the transfer of goods, information and services between buyers and suppliers in the value chain. Singh, Lakshmi et al. (2005) believe that a standard ontology for trading partners is necessary for seamless transformation of information, and that knowledge is essential for supply chain collaboration.
• E-Marketplaces – in these environments intermediaries perform a critical role in bringing together buyers and suppliers in an e-marketplace and facilitating transactions between them. Singh & Iyer (2003) contend that the integration of intelligence and knowledge within and across e-marketplaces can enhance the coordination of activities among collaborating firms.
• Healthcare - Pollard (2004) states that knowledge management activities in
healthcare centre on the acquisition and storage of information, and presently lack the ability to share and transfer knowledge across systems and organizations to support individual user productivity. Semantic Web technologies can enable health information integration, thus providing the transparency for healthcare-related processes involving all entities within and between hospitals, as well as stakeholders such as pharmacies, insurance providers, healthcare providers, and clinical laboratories. According to Eysenback (2003), such innovations can lead to enhanced caregiver effectiveness, work satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and overall quality in healthcare.
• E-government - refers to the use of Internet technologies for the delivery of government services to citizens and businesses. The aim of e-government is to streamline processes and improve interactions with business and industry, empower citizens with the right information, and improve the efficiency of e-government management (Teswanich, Anutariya & V 2002, p. 30). Teswanich et al. (op. cit) state that there is a critical need to manage the knowledge and information resources stored in these disparate systems, and that emerging Semantic Web technologies can enable transparent information and knowledge exchange to enhance e-government processes. After comprehensively examining the use of Semantic Web based e-commerce applications for e-government services, Klischewski & Jeenicke (2004) concluded that although such applications and functions are integral, at present it is very difficult to recommend technical solutions and identify best practices in this area, and that further research is therefore required.
• E-Learning - Semantic Web technologies are widely used in e-learning because they meet the most important e-learning requirements: quickness, just-in-time learning, and pertinence (Castellanos & Fernández 2004, p. 61). Learning materials can be efficiently semantically annotated so these materials can be reused in different courses. Moreover, access to content can be customized according to student needs and preferences. The adjustment of the Semantic Web to e-learning needs is illustrated by Stojanovic (2001). There, the following issues concerning the Semantic Web were considered: 1) knowledge items are distributed on the Web and they are linked to consensus ontologies; 2) the user makes semantic searches for desired materials; 3) the Semantic Web has the potential to become an integration platform for business processes; 4) there is active information delivery to create a dynamic learning environment; 5) authority is as decentralized as possible; 6) users search for material suited to their needs; 7) the Semantic Web allows for using the knowledge provided in different forms through the semantic annotation of materials; and 8) each user has a personalized agent that communicates with other agents to obtain materials.
A major area of semantic e-business not covered in this sub-section is e-tourism, which is reviewed in section 2.3.
2.2.2.2 Semantic Portals
Web portals are entry points for information presentation and exchange over the Internet used by a community of interest. Hence, they require efficient support for communication and information sharing. Lara et al. (2004) state that current Web technologies present serious limitations regarding information search, access, extraction, interpretation and processing, and that these limitations are naturally inherited by existing Web portals, thus hampering the communication and information sharing process between community members. The application of Semantic Web technologies has the potential to overcome these limitations and, therefore, used to evolve current Web portals into semantically enhanced Web portals.
The notion of semantic portals is that a collection of resources is indexed using a rich domain ontology, as opposed to say, a flat keyword list. Search and navigation of the underlying resources then occur by exploiting the structure of this ontology. Reynolds (2001) explains that this allows search to be tied to specific facets of the descriptive metadata and to exploit controlled vocabulary terms – leading to much more precise searches. There are several advantages inherent in using Semantic Web standards for portal design compared to traditional portals. Lara et al. (op. cit) believe that a main benefit is the ability to model a portal’s structure using ontologies as the starting point. Ontologies are best suited to represent consensus knowledge and its structure. According to Lara et al. (op. cit), this is exactly what is needed to exchange information within a community of interest and to enable automated processing of information items.
Reynolds (op. cit) sees the decentralized nature of Semantic Web technologies as another major advantage, because this makes it possible for portal information to be an aggregation of a large number of small information sources instead of a single central location where people submit information. The portals can be reorganized to suit different user needs while the domain indexes remain stable and reusable. Communities of interest can share access to the same underlying information using a different navigation structure, search facility and presentation format. Reynolds (op. cit) adds that in this situation, central organization is still needed in the initial stages to provide the start-up impetus and ensure that appropriate ontologies and controlled vocabularies are adopted. Once the system reaches a critical mass though, information providers can then take
responsibility for publishing their own information, provided it is annotated in accordance with the correct domain ontology.
An example of this decentralized approach is the ARKive portal17, which publishes
multimedia objects depicting endangered species. ARKive just provides the backbone structure of resources by making its ontology available for use. Individual communities of interest then supply the additional classifications, annotations, and navigational interfaces to suit their needs. The application of Semantic Web technologies also makes it easier to integrate data across portals by applying mapping and merging techniques to shared or compatible ontologies. Techniques for ontology integration are discussed in sub-section 2.2.8. Table 1 shows a comparison of traditional and semantic portals.