Semantic-Web-Based Knowledge Management: Guest Editors' Introduction

The Semantic Web promises to make Web-accessible data more amenable to
machine processing. This special issue of "IEEE Internet Computing"
presents several proposals for the Semantic Web. Hundreds of millions
of users can now access several billion documents on the Web, and even
larger data sets reside in organizations' intranets and Web-accessible
databases -- the so-called deep Web. As the amount of available data
continues to grow rapidly, it's increasingly difficult for users to
find, organize, access, and maintain the information they require. At
the same time, the notion of the Semantic Web1 promises to make
Web-accessible data more amenable to machine processing. The Semantic
Web is about labeling (annotating) information so that computer systems
(and humans) can process it more meaningfully. The semantics underlying
such annotations usually come from ontologies, which encapsulate
agreement among information creators and users with help from common
nomenclature and the use of rich knowledge representation. We can
distinguish three broad phases in knowledge-management trends in recent
years. In the repository-centric phase, we had one or more central
information repositories with a set of corporate contributors and
reviewers. Second was the move to smaller, facilitated knowledge
communities. Finally, a recent trend that includes social computing
(the use of wikis, blogs, networking sites, collaborative filtering,
and so on) and a less static view of knowledge and its representation
has expanded and replaced previous knowledge-management archetypes.
Knowledge sharing at a global level requires ontological agreements
that support increased interoperability and integration reference
layers. Several frameworks within knowledge-management theory set
contexts for scientific debate. Some emphasize the knowledge life
cycle, others the knowledge product, and many researchers have recently
begun to emphasize the knowledge and social networking perspective,
as previously described. The rapid adoption of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0
technologies adds to this picture a tight connection between knowledge
management, social networks, and various implicit, formal, or powerful
semantics. More Information