Social Dimensions of Semantic Technologies and Web Services

In this chapter, several knowledge representation and processing techniques based on a symbolic and semantic approach are briefly described. The majority of present-day techniques, like the relational database model or OWL (Web Ontology Language), is based on the symbolic approach and supports the representation and processing of semantically related knowledge. Although these two techniques have found many successful applications, there are certain limitations in their wider use, stemming from the use of naming in explicit description of the meaning of the represented knowledge. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose a technique based on the semantic approach, Hierarchical Semantic Form (HSF), that uses semantic contexts to implicitly define the meaning. This chapter first provides concise information about the two most popular techniques and their limitations