A new FP6 Network of Excellence:
REWERSE - Reasoning on the Web
with Rules and Semantics
by
on behalf of the consortium
A new FP6 network of
excellence is being established, to start beginning of
2004 (the contract with the Commission is expected to be signed in the course
of November or December 2003), whose addressed strategic objectives concern
“Semantic-Based Knowledge Systems”. This news item is meant
to inform the Computational Logic community of REWERSE’s overall objectives and
participants.
1. Summary
The objective of REWERSE is
to establish
1.
networking and structuring a scientific
community that needs it; and by
2.
providing tangible technological bases that do
not exist today for an industrial software development of advanced Web systems
and applications.
The community networked and
structured by REWERSE will
§
develop a coherent and complete, yet minimal, collection of
inter-operable reasoning languages for advanced Web systems and applications;
§
test these languages on context-adaptiveWeb systems andWeb-based
decision support systems selected as test-beds for proof-of-concept purposes;
§
bring the proposed languages to the level of open
pre-standards amenable to submissions to standardisation bodies such as the
W3C.
REWERSE will develop Education
and Training activities targeted at Universities as well as Technology
Transfer and Awareness activities targeted at the European industry on reasoning
languages for Web systems and applications. Reasoning languages for the Web are
an emerging technology that does not exist today. This technology will soon
represent an essential breakthrough for Web systems and applications. Thus,
REWERSE will promote research on an issue of a considerable economical
importance. Doing so, REWERSE will contribute to the international
competitiveness of the European industry in an essential field of today’s
Information Technologies.
REWERSE will establish
itself as the world leading virtual research centre on reasoning
languages and methods for the Web. REWERSE will ensure that this novel
technology is fully exploited and translated into real
competitive advantages for the European industry.
2.
Network Objectives
2.1
Scientific Objective
The
objective of REWERSE is to establish
(1)
networking and structuring a scientific community; and by
(2)
providing tangible technological bases for an industrial
software development of advanced Web systems and applications.
Striving
for tangible outcomes, REWERSE will
§ develop a coherent and
complete, yet minimal, collection of reasoning languages and prototype
processors for these languages for advanced Web systems and applications;
§ test these languages and
their prototype processors on context-adaptive Web systems and Web-based
decision support systems selected as test-beds for proof-of-concept purposes;
§ bring the proposed languages and
their prototype processors to the level of (prototypically implemented and
tested) open pre-standards amenable to submissions to standardisation bodies.
Reasoning
languages for the Web, although already considered
and/or prototypically developed in a restricted manner in some research
contexts, are still a technology that does not exist today. Such a technology
will represent an essential breakthrough for the current Web and the so-called
Semantic Web. REWERSE will promote applied research on this issue of a considerable
economical importance.
2.2
Scientific context and focus
REWERSE strives for advanced
Web systems and applications sometimes referred to as Semantic Web, a term
coined in 2001 by Tim Berners-Lee et. al. in the article
“The Semantic Web” in Scientific American ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21 ). This term refers to one
of the major current endeavours world wide in Information Technologies. Its
goal may be briefly described as enriching the existing Web with meta-data and
data processing (and meta-data processing) so as to provide Web-based systems
with advanced (so-called intelligent) capabilities, in particular with
context-awareness and decision support, strengthening a person centred,
everyday use of the Web.
Reasoning
languages are essential to advanced Web systems and applications. The advanced
capabilities striven for in most Semantic Web application scenarii primarily
call for reasoning (also referred to as logic, deductive, or rule-based)
capabilities. Such reasoning capabilities are offered by currently developed
Semantic Web languages and/or reasoning systems such as DAML+OIL and OWL 2,
BPEL4WS 3, BPML, DAML-S 4, ConsVISor 5, JTP 6, and Triple 7. These languages,
however, are developed mostly from functionality centred (e.g. ontology
reasoning or access validation) or application centred (e.g. Web service
retrieval and composition) perspectives.
Complementing
these activities, REWERSE promotes a perspective centred on the reasoning
techniques (e.g. forward or backward chaining, tableau-like methods, constraint
reasoning, etc.). This REWERSE perspective gives rise to recognise the forms of
reasoning needed by Web systems and applications that are inherently different,
thus making it possible to provide with a minimal collection of complementary and inter-operable
reasoning languages for theWeb. Recently,Web circles
such as the W3C are becoming conscious of a need for functionality and
application independent reasoning languages as generic building-stones of Web
and Semantic Web systems and applications. REWERSE aims at fulfilling this
need.
2.
3 Participant Institutions
(1)
(3) Institutul National de
Cercetare-Dezvoltare in Informatica,
(4)
(8)
(9) Universität Hannover,
(10) Foundation of Reasearch and Technology –
(11) Friedrich-Schiller-Universität
(12) LibRT,
(13)
(14) Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
(15) Technische Universität Dresden,
(16)
(17)
(18) INRIA-Unité de Recherche
(19)
(20) INRIA Rocquencourt,
(21) Högskolan i Skövde,
(22)
(23)
(24)
(25)
(26)
(27)
(28)
(29) webXcerpt Software
GmbH,
(30)