Views for light-weight Web ontologies

Abstract

The Semantic Web aims at easy integration and usage of content by building on a semi-structured data model where data semantics are explicitly specified through ontologies. However, ontologies and thereby ontology-based applications themselves suffer from heterogeneity. Therefore a new level of data independence is required to allow the customization of information, e.g. towards the needs of other agents, which can be achieved by exploiting database view principles. This paper addresses this issue and presents a new view mechanism for the data models underlying the Semantic Web, RDF and RDFS.