What’s happening in Semantic Web... and what FCA could have to do with it

The Semantic Web [27] is gaining momentum. Driven by over 10 years of focused project funding in the US and the EU, Semantic Web Technologies are now entering application areas in industry, academia, government, and the open Web. The Semantic Web is based on the idea of describing the meaning – or se-mantics – of data on the Web using metadata – data that describes other data – in the form of ontologies, which are represented using logic-based knowledge-representation languages [26]. Central to the transfer of Semantic Web into practice is the Linked Open Data effort [7], which has already resulted in the publication, on the Web, of billions of pieces of information using ontology lan-guages. This provides the basic data needed for establishing intelligent system applications on the Web in the tradition of Semantic Web Technologies. Despite considerable success and progress, the field of Semantic Web Tech-nologies still requires considerable conceptual advances in order to come to its full potential [23, 24, 29]. Below, we briefly list some research challenges where Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) could contribute as a method, and list some of the past FCA-related work on these issues.1 1 Ontology Generation Semantic Web applications require knowledge represented in the form of ontolo-gies. However, the generation of such ontologies is a formidable modeling task which requires both ontology modeling expertise, profound domain knowledge, and an understanding of technical application requirements. Any automated or semi-automated tools which make ontology generation simpler and less costly are therefore highly desirable to have. Automated or semi-automated generation of ontologies has been studied to a considerable extent, and some of this work uses FCA as a main componen