DBin is a Semantic Web application that enables groups of users
with a common interest to cooperatively create semantically
structured knowledge bases. These user groups, which we call
“Semantic Web Communities”, are made possible by creating
customized user environments called “Brainlets”. Brainlets
provide user interfaces and domain specific tools (e.g. querying,
viewing and editing facilities) which enable community
participants to interact with the data of interest. Brainlets are
directly created by domain experts using an XML description
language. DBin clients communicate and exchange annotations
using a P2P infrastructure. Access control and digital signatures
put by DBin inside the authored RDF enable trust and information
filtering. In this paper we show a specific use case where a
“Semantic Web Community” is created to enable a group of users
to share their del.icio.us tags and organize them into a
cooperatively built RDFS ontology.
From our point of view the Semantic Web stack currently is used as follows: (cf. Fig. 1):
The Semantic Web Stack with Multimedia Metadata and Web Service descriptions
Fig. 1.: The Semantic Web Stack with Multimedia Metadata and Web Service descriptions.
Where (from bottom up):
* The two lowest layers, i.e. Unicode for a platform-neutral encoding and XML for the platform-neutral document representation are common to all (Semantic) Web applications
* Above the XML layer we have a rough distinction in the multimedia aspect and the Web Service aspect:
o On the Semantic Web/Multimedia tower we have both MPEG-7 and RDF/OWL for representing low and high-level features, possibly extended by rules
o On the Semantic Web/Services tower we have either the RDF/OWL/OWL-S-based branch or the WSML-based branch, both grounded on WSDL, again possibly using rules on the highest level.