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Ontologies provide a common vocabulary of an area and define, with different levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and the relationships between them. Ontological engineering refers to the set of activities concerning the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. During the last decade, increasing attention has been focused on ontologies. Ontologies are now widely used in knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and computer science; in applications related to areas such as knowledge management, natural language processing, e-commerce, intelligent information integration, bio-informatics, education; and in new emerging fields like the semantic web. The book presents the major issues of ontological engineering and describes the most outstanding ontologies currently available. It covers the practical aspects of selecting and applying methodologies, languages, and tools for building ontologies. Ontological Engineering will be of great value to students and researchers, and to developers who want to integrate ontologies in their information systems.

The Semantic Web, that adds a conceptual layer of machine-understandable metadata to the existing content, will make the content available for processing by intelligent software allowing automatic resource integration and providing interoperability between heterogeneous systems. The Semantic Web is now the most important influence on the development of the Web. The next generation of intelligent applications will be capable of making use of suchmetadata to perform resource discovery and integration based on its sematics. Sematic Web aims at developing a global environment on top of Web with interoperable heterogeneous applications, agents, web services, data repositories, humans, and so on. On the technology side, Web-oriented languages and technologies are being developed (e.g. RDF, OWL, OWL-S, WSMO, etc.), and the success of the Semantic Web will depend on a wide-spread industrial adoption of these technologies. Trend within worldwide activities related to Semantic Web definitely shows that the technology has emerging growth of interest both academic and industry during a relatively small time interval.

Classifying objects into categories at different granularity levels, establishing links between known objects, and discovering clues between known and unknown objects are essential for new-generation semantic data models. This book introduces the Resource Space Model (RSM), which effectively organizes and correctly manages resources by normalizing classification semantics.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2008, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in September 2008.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2005, held in New York, NY, USA, in November 2005.