Preface
The success of the World Wide Web depends on the ability of users to store, pro-
cess and retrieve digital information regardless of distance boundaries, languages
and domains of knowledge. The universality and flexibility of the World Wide Web
have also enabled the rapid growth of a variety of new services and applications
based on human–machine interaction. The semantics of exchanged information and
services should be useful not only for human to human communications, but also in
that machines would be able to understand and automatically process web content.
Semantics give well-defined meaning to web content and enable computers and peo-
ple to work in cooperation. Today, the crucial challenge becomes the development
of languages to express information in a machine processable format. Now more
than ever, new advanced techniques and intelligent approaches are required to trans-
form the Web into a universal reasoning and computing machine. Web intelligence
attempts to deal with this challenge by exploiting information technologies and ar-
tificial intelligence approaches to design the next generation of web-empowered
systems and services.
1 Introduction
The semantic Web plays a crucial role in the development of information technolo-
gies and services on the World Wide Web. It takes on new challenges in which the
meaning of information enable computers to understand the Web content and imi-
tate human intelligence in performing more of the tedious tasks involved in finding,
sharing, and combining information on the web. Until now computers have not been
able to fully accomplish these tasks without human intervention since web pages are
designed to be understood by people, not machines. Tim Berners-Lee originally ex-
pressed his vision about the semantic Web. In his word, he wrote: “[I] have a dream
for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the
Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Seman-
tic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the
day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by
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