David Dubin

Senior Research Scientist
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“SEMANTIC MARKUP OR MARKUP SEMANTICS?"

Monday, March 22, 2004
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Room 403, IS Building

Abstract: The Semantic Web is an active area of research and standardization, aimed at what are perceived to be shortcomings of current methods for representing content in digital documents. Technologies such as RDF equip markup languages with the functionality of general-purpose knowledge representation systems, but the ability to put richly encoded content on the web doesn't make the task of creating that content any easier. Furthermore, the limited expressivity of conventional markup languages may be precisely what makes those languages attractive to and usable by content creators.

One part of a solution to the knowledge acquisition bottleneck may lie in research with more modest goals than the Semantic Web. The BECHAMEL project is investigating methods for characterizing the meaning of conventional markup so that the facts and relationships represented by the occurrence of its constructs can be explicitly, comprehensively, and mechanically identified. Simple fundamental semantic facts about markup that are relied on by both markup language users and software designers are currently left to conjectures that are error-prone, incomplete, and unverifiable, even when the language designer properly documents the language. Our goal is to make the meaning of document markup sufficiently systematic, uniform, complete, and exploitable to achieve higher levels of functionality and system interoperability.