Workshop at WWW2006, Edinburgh, UK, May 2006
Reasoning on the Web (RoW06)

Invited talk by Ian Horrocks, University of Manchester

Title:
Ontology Reasoning: Why and How

Abstract: 
The World Wide Web is phenomenally successful, and has made
an unprecedented range of information and services available to an
unprecedented number of users, but there is an urgent need for more
intelligent applications that can better exploit these resources and
prevent users being overwhelmed by their sheer volume. The goal of
Semantic Web research is to facilitate the development of such
applications by transforming the Web from a linked document repository
into a distributed knowledge base and application platform. Ontologies
will play a key role in this transformation by capturing knowledge
that will enable applications to better understand Web accessible
resources, and to use them more intelligently. This talk will discuss
the contribution of basic research in knowledge representation to the
design of OWL, a Semantic Web ontology language developed by the World
Wide Web Consortium, and show how this design facilitates reasoning
over ontologies; it will also explore why the developers and users of
ontologies might want such reasoning.