Watson: A Gateway for the Semantic Web

As the Semantic Web is gaining momentum, more and more
semantic data is available online. The second generation of Semantic
Web applications already exploit this phenomenon by relying on this
huge amount of semantic content. Looking at the requirements of these
applications, we show that there is a need for an efficient access point to
the Semantic Web, designed to take into account the semantic nature of
the knowledge available online. However, because they rely on “classical
Web” techniques, existing solutions fail to fulfill this need. In this paper,
we describe the design of Watson, a gateway for the Semantic Web,
which has been guided by the requirements of Semantic Web applications
and by lessons learnt from previous systems. We show how Watson
exploits the strengths of semantic technologies to provide fundamental
functionalities for a more suitable access to online knowledge. We also
report on using these functionalities to analyze some of the characteristics
of the content of the Semantic Web.
Keywords: Semantic Web gateway, Semantic Web search engine, ontol-
ogy discovery.