Abstract
Activities such as Web Services and the Semantic Web are working to create a distributed web of machine understandable data. We address three important problems that need to be solved to realize this vision. We discuss the problem of scalable and deployable query systems and present a simple, but general query interface called GetData. We address the issue of creating global agreements on vocabularies and introduce the concept of Semantic Negotiation, a process by which two programs can bootstrap from small shared vocabularies to larger shared vocabularies. We discuss the problem of programs determining which data sources to trust and present a solution that uses a Web of Trust between Semantic Web registries. We briefly describe TAP, a system that implements the GetData interface, Semantic Negotiation and Web of Trust enabled registries. We then introduce an application of the Semantic Web called Semantic Search and describe an implemented system which uses the data from the Semantic Web to improve traditional search results. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.