WebQR: Building a Knowledge Representation Application on the Semantic Web

Abstract. The Semantic Web (SW) was originally positioned as a com-bination of Knowledge Representation (KR) and the Web. However, most applications that use SW data today lean more towards the Information Retrieval spectrum. The reason for this is that traditional KR systems are designed to work with datasets that are small, curated, homogeneous, and application-specific. However, the SW is large-scale, messy, and het-erogeneous. We present a software project called WebQR in which we take a traditional KR application: Qualitative Reasoning, but implement it on top of the SW. We show that reimagining a traditional KR sys-tem in the context of the SW opens up many opportunities but presents several problems for application development as well.