Valentin's Blog

While writing a position paper for this years ISWC we collected a nice selection of what I would consider to be the major high level Semantic Web papers. Only almost philosophical papers, few technical details. I though that maybe (a part of) this list could also be helpful to others - as subjective and incomplete as it is. Most links don't go directly to a pdf but should help everyone (even without access to electronic journals) to get the papers with at most 4 clicks :)

Underlying Ideas:
  Allen Newell: The Knowledge Level (1980) - THE paper about defining knowledge. Ever wondered why people say that "knowledge" cannot be stored? Here you find the answer. 
  Thomas R. Gruber: Towards Principles for the Design of Ontologies used for Knowledge Sharing (1995) - An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization, sound familiar? This is the paper where it's from. However, if you're really interested in understanding the ontologies, you should at least read Nicola Guarino: Formal Ontology and Information System (1998) as well.

The Idea:
  Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila - The Semantic Web (2001). And obviously Shadbolt, Hall and Berners-Lee - The Semantic Web Revisited (2006). I also recommend to read Frank van Harmelen: How the Semantic Web will change KR: challenges and opportunities for a new research agenda (2002) for a description of what sets the Semantic Web apart from previous KRR research. And Antoniou, Harmelen: Web Ontology Language: OWL (2004).  And on the current state the (imho a bit too optimistic) Harmelen: Semantic Web Research anno 2006: main streams popular fallacies, current status and future challenges (2006).

Ok, here now could be papers on all the topics from matching, learning to Semantic Web Services .. but maybe some other time, I'll only take some with relevance to the whole of the Semantic Web idea.

On the social dimension of the Semantic Web: Peter Mika: Ontologies are Us: A Unified Model Of Social Networks and Semantics (2005).
Real bottom up Semantic Web: Karl Aberer et al. : Emergent Semantics Principles and Issues (2004)
On Ontologies and Change: Natalya Noy and Michel Klein: "Ontology Evolution, Not the Same as Schema Evolution" (2004) and (mostly on change) Martin Hepp: Possible Ontologies, How Reality Constrains the Development of Relevant Ontologies (2007)

Fundamental (and justified) critic on the current state of the Semantic Web research can be found in Fensel, Harmelen: Unifying Reasoning and Search to Web Scale (2007) and in Kalfoglou et al.: On the Emergent Semantic Web and Overlooked Issues (2006).

On the issue of Logic Programs for the Semantic Web I recommend Bry, Marchiori: Ten Thesis on Logic Languages for the Semantic Web (2005) and Kifer et al: A Realistic Architecture for the Semantic Web (2005) as pro LP. And Horrocks et al: Semantic Web Architecture: Stack or Two Towers and Motik et al: Can OWL and Logic Programming Live Together Happily Ever After (2006) on contra.

And as the last topic for this already very long post: there are very interesting ideas surrounding the issue of massive Semantic heterogeneity (millions of partly overlapping schemas/ontologies)  not addressed by mainstream Semantic Web in these two papers: Madhavan et al: Web-scale Data Integration: You can only afford to Pay As You Go (2007) and Lopez et al: PowerMap: Mapping the Real Semantic Web on the Fly (2006).

Labels: SemanticWeb