Semantic Web and Ontologies

The Semantic Web, thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. The Semantic Web envisages a next generation of the current Web, where the published information will be semantically described. Web Services will also be enhanced with semantic descriptions which will allow for automated discovery, composition, invocation and monitoring. This introduction of semantics aims at providing Intelligence in the current process models.
Cornerstones of Semantic Web are ontologies. An ontology is a list of formal terms, i.e. identifiers for categories of objects, plus machine-understandable statements defining a formal meaning for these terms, in other words, some of their characteristics or inter-relations, rules or constraints of use. These statements permit some semantic checking on the manual introduction of new statements and some logical inference to generate new statements, e.g. for information retrieval purposes.
We believe that Pervasive Computing (or Ambient Intelligence) can and should make use of the Semantic Web technologies and ontologies in order to realize some of its inherent concepts such as prediction, inference, proactivity, reasoning and self-description. Our research is mainly oriented at context modeling with the aid of ontologies, Semantic Web Services engineering (discovery, composition, etc.), theoretic foundations of semantics (e.g., Description Logics), and tools for ontological reasoning.

Research