Semantic technologies

Semantic technologies can be described as technologies that provide tools and methods to build more adaptive and flexible software by exploiting the meaning of the information at hand. In the FFI project Semantini, Semantic Services in INI (INformation Infrastructure), these technologies are studied in order to evaluate if, and how, they can be utilised in military applications. Of special interest is their use in providing flexible services within the forthcoming information infrastructure in an implementation of the Norwegian military concept Network Based Defence.

One of the strongest drivers for semantic technologies at the moment is the work related to the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is a vision presented in (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila 2001) that is based on evolving the current World Wide Web from a web of documents to a web of data. Semantic technologies are in particular expected to do two things for the Semantic Web: (1) Make more data currently connected to the web globally available and (2) make services connected to the web and tagged with metadata easier to find for users and other services.

In the report, five core semantic technologies are identified: Knowledge representation, ontologies, reasoning and rules, querying, and agents and services.

Semantic technologies are expected to provide several interesting capabilities enhancing the potential of traditional information technologies regarding making more adaptive and flexible software. In this report, we have focused on the following capabilities: Information integration, federated querying, mediation, information fusion, semantic service-oriented architecture and semantic grid, semantic search, and information presentation and navigation.

There are still several issues regarding semantic technologies, some of which are presented here: The ontology mapping problem is not entirely solved, there are issues regarding reasoning and decidability, there looks to be no immediate convergence between the different Semantic Web Service initiatives, and tools and infrastructures for semantic technologies are still immature in some areas.

The conclusion of the report is that semantic technologies are a promising family of information technologies that potentially can deliver critical capabilities also in the military domain. Some semantic technologies, like for example RDF and OWL, enjoy a relatively high level of maturity, and lately there has been an increase in semantic technology-based products brought to the market. However, as several members of the semantic technology family still are experimental, more research and experimentation is needed to evaluate whether they can deliver as promised and hoped. It is likely that several of the core services in the future information infrastructure (INI) will benefit from semantic technologies, but in order to further evaluate these technologies for use in the Norwegian Defence, there is a need for more thorough studies in cooperation with military domain experts.