Ontobroker: Transforming the WWW into a Knowledge Base

. The World Wide Web (WWW) could be viewed as the largest knowledge base that has ever existed. However, its support in automated inference is very limited. We propose formalized ontologies as means to enrich web documents for representing semantic information for overcoming this bottleneck. Ontologies enable informed search for information as well as the derivation of additional knowledge that is not directly represented in the WWW. Such an ontology can be used by a subgroup of web users that share a common point of interest like e.g. newsgroups in the internet or intranets of companies and other organisations. The paper describes a software tool called Ontobroker that provide the necessary support in realizing this approach. Basically it provides a formalism for annotating HTML documents with ontological information and for defining ontologies; a webcrawler that collects information from the web; and an inference machine that enable query answering based on the ontology and the colle..