Editor's Introduction to the Special Issue on Semantic Informational Technologies

The term semantic informational technologies (or, shorter, semantic technologies) emerged in the 2000s as a generic concept for the qualification of a group of quickly progressing technologies including, in particular, semantics-oriented natural language processing technologies, the use of ontologies in the Semantic Web project and in many other projects of applied intelligent systems, cross-language conceptual information retrieval, ontology-based images recognition and retrieval, the generation of natural language (NL) texts, proceeding from the inner representations of their meanings, the elaboration of content representation languages as a part of agent communication languages in multi-agent systems, and the development of formal means for representing the records of e-negotiations and forming the contracts in the subfield of electronic commerce called e-contracting. The common features of the technologies from this group is either processing of NL-texts with respect to the fact that lexical items have the meanings (i.e., are associated with one or several semantic items) or/and processing information with respect to an ontology (i.e., with respect to a set of interrelated formal records corresponding to the concepts and the connections of concepts underpinning natural language processing by people). papers were carefully selected on the basis of peer reviews. Two distinguished features of this issue as a whole are as follows. Firstly, the papers from this special issue describe the studies pertaining to the main branches of semantic informational technologies and, as a consequence, give a rather good initial look at the current state of this field. Secondly, the spectrum of described and discussed subjects is very large: from the industrial applications of the methods and models developed under the framework of the Semantic Web project to the strategy and formal tools of transforming the existing World Wide Web into a Semantic Web of a new generation. Biology and medicine (biomedicine) are the fields where the methods of semantics-oriented natural language processing (NLP) are being very intensively developed and applied to solving practical tasks. The paper "Obtaining Status Descriptions via Automatic Analysis of Hospital Patient Records" by S. these fields. The paper describes the progress of the study aimed at automatic extraction of patient status data from medical texts in Bulgarian language. It is shown that certain patient-related facts can be relatively easily extracted from the texts. France) describes an original application of the methods of NLP to building and expanding conceptual classes. To find the effective solutions to this problem is important not only …