Making Semantic Web a Reality through Active Semantic Spaces

Semantic Web has become an active research field in the academic society while at the same time it is still not widely recognized by the public. A crucial reason is the lack of simple and generic show cases for normal web users. Interests from end-users are the essential driving force to all the web technologies. In this paper we propose active semantic spaces (ASpaces) that address this unsolved problem. Each ASpace becomes a personal machine agent for web users. In an active semantic space, (1) ontologies provide formal knowledge for machine agents to communicate with both human users and the other ASpace agents; (2) semantic annotation and authoring methods allow users to present both their interests and their orders to ASpace agents; (3) actively generated web services allow ASpace agents to correctly execute users’ requests on the web; and (4) through Web-2.0 style blogging techniques ASpace agents feedback the execution results to web users. In the implementation, we have adopted simple but mature technologies so that the deliverance of our active semantic spaces is promising. While ASpaces can exist simultaneously with the current web, the widely adoption of ASpaces will realize us the dream of the Semantic Web.