What Formalism for the Semantic Web?

The world is changing. The World Wide Web is changing. It started out as a set of purely notational conventions for interconnecting information over the Internet. The focus of information processing has now shifted from local disconnected disc-bound silos to Internet-wide interconnected clouds. The nature of information has also evolved. From raw uniform data, it has now taken the shape of semi-structured data and meaning-carrying so-called “Knowledge Bases. ” While it was sufficient to process raw data with structure-aware querying, it has now become necessary to process knowledge with contents-aware reasoning. Computing must therefore adapt from dealing with mere ex-plicit data to inferring implicit knowledge. How to represent such knowledge and how inference therefrom can be made effective (whether reasoning or learning) is thus a central challenge among the many now facing the world wide web. So called “ontologies ” are being specified and meant to encode formally encyclo-pedic as well as domain-specific knowledge. One early (still on-going) such effort has been the Cyc1 system. It is a knowledge-representation system (using LISP syntax) that makes use of a set of varied reasoning methods, altogether dubbed “commonsense. ”