Bootstrapping semantics on the web

In most web sites, web-based applications (such as web portals, e-marketplaces, search engines), and in the file systems of personal computers, a wide variety of schemas (such as taxonomies, directory trees, thesauri, Entity-Relationship schemas, RDF Schemas) are published which (i) convey a clear meaning to humans (e.g. help in the navigation of large collections of documents), but (ii) convey only a small fraction (if any) of their meaning to machines, as their intended meaning is not formally/explicitly represented. In this paper we present a general methodology for automatically eliciting and representing the intended meaning of these structures, and for making this meaning available in domains like information integration and interoperability, web service discovery and composition, peer-to-peer knowledge management, and semantic browsers. We also present an implementation (called CtxMatch2) of how such a method can be used for semantic interoperability.