Semantics for the Semantic Web: The Implicit, the Formal and the Powerful

Enabling applications that exploit heterogeneous data in the Semantic Web will require us to harness a broad variety of semantics. Considering the role of semantics in a number of research areas in computer science, we organize semantics in three forms: implicit, formal and powerful, and explore their roles in enabling some of the key capabilities related to the Semantic Web. The central message of this paper is that building the Semantic Web purely on description logics will artificially limit it potential, and that we will need to both exploit well known techniques that support implicit semantics, and develop more powerful semantic techniques