Knowledge publishing and access on the Semantic Web: A sociotechnological analysis

A sociotechnological analysis of knowledge publishing and inherent flexibility in semantic technology with an integration of bottom-up and top-down approaches to ontology building, is discussed. The Semantic Web is an extension of the web in which information is given well defined meaning in which semantic-aware agents can use to provide smart functionalities. The Semantics Web is rapidly growing, and the future web will exhibit large amounts of distributed semantic information, on a large scale comparable to that of the current web. Any semantic markup generated will be based on some ontology, defining the conceptual framework in which semantic information is given meaning. Ontologies should express concepts as used in different cultures, thereby avoiding that the Semantic Web would force an unnecessary semantic standardization. The availability of a semantics on a large scale is likely to revolutionize data mining, leading to the development of new tools for business intelligence.