The Semantic Web is an exciting vision for the future of information technology, but it is a vision that presupposes the ability to represent web content with efficiency and expressiveness. If a scalable way to add semantics to the World Wide Web (WWW) can be found, the Semantic Web will create a world where agents, search engines, and other programs can read semantic markup to decipher the real meaning of a web page. The Semantic Web-aware agents will be able to retrieve computer readable facts, integrate and reason about those facts, answer questions, solve problems, and generally bring a new level of intelligence to the WWW that is unimaginable with today’s technology. For a good introduction read Scientific American's article, "The Semantic Web".

The success of the Semantic Web hinges on solving two key problems: (1) enabling novice users to create semantic markup easily, and (2) developing tools that can harvest the semantically rich but ontologically inconsistent web that will result. To solve the first problem, it is important that any novice be able to author a web page effortlessly, with full semantic markup, using any ontology he understands. The Semantic Web must allow novices to construct their own individual or specialized-local ontologies, without imposing the need for them to learn about or integrate with an overarching, globally consistent, master ontology.

The resulting Web will be rich in semantics, but poor in ontological consistency. Once end-users are empowered by the Semantic Web to create their own ontologies, there will be an urgent need to interrelate those ontologies in a useful way. The key to harvesting this new semantic information will be the creation of the Semantic Web-aware agents that can cope with a diversity of meanings and inconsistencies across local ontologies. These agents will need the capability to interpret, understand, elaborate, and translate among the many heterogeneous local ontologies that will populate the the Semantic Web.

Cycorp's effort is targeted at the situation where the ontologies to be translated are not richly specified, where a novice has quickly created a “light weight” ontology, just to get started. In that case, it will be necessary to interpret, elaborate, and fill-in intended meanings of the terms and then map those meanings to better-defined semantic structures. With this kind of semantic enrichment, heterogeneous ontologies can both function for their particular local purpose and be useful globally throughout the Semantic Web by being interrelated to other ontologies. To see the results of our work, visit the DAML web site and its Ontology Library.