Software Engineering and the Semantic Web: A match made in heaven or in hell?

Abstract

The Semantic Web provides models and abstractions for the distributed processing of knowledge bases. In Software Engineering endeavors such capabilities are direly needed, for ease of implementation, maintenance, and software analysis. Conversely, software engineering has collected decades of experience in engineering large application frameworks containing both inheritance and aggregation. This experience could be of great use when, for example, thinking about the development of ontologies. These examples — and many others — seem to suggest that researchers from both fields should have a field day collaborating: On the surface this looks like a match made in heaven. But is that the case? This talk will explore the opportunities for cross-fertilization of the two research fields by presenting a set of concrete examples. In addition to the opportunities it will also try to identify cases of fools gold (pyrite), where the differences in method, tradition, or semantics between the two research fields may lead to a wild goose chase.