SemWeb. An environment for integrated access to distributed ontological and lexical knowledge bases and their collaborative development and maintenance. A proposal

This paper presents a proposal and a call for participation in the long-range development of an open, multifunctional, multilingual system for integrated access to many kinds of ontological and lexical knowledge that would support, among many other functions, software localization and CASE tool databases for multinational development teams. A SemWeb system would provide integrated access to existing knowledge bases through a common interface that would search several knowledge bases and collate the data into a common format defined by the SemWeb template. It would also allow the incremental development of a common integrated distributed knowledge base to be shared by a work group or world-wide. A common knowledge base would support collaboration in ontological and lexical projects. Over time, it could absorb data from other knowledge bases, allowing for tighter integration than common interface access. The system would be usable by many levels of users.