Hypermedia = The Semantic Web ? Position paper

The Semantic Web is still a web, a collection of linked nodes. Navigation of links is currently, and will remain for humans if not machines, a key mechanism for exploring the space. The Semantic Web is viewed by many as a knowledge base, a database or an indexed and searchable document collection; in the work discussed here we view it as a hypertext. The aim of the COHSE project is to research into methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of Web documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). The objective is link creation rather than resource discovery; in contrast, many existing projects are concerned primarily with the discovery of resources (reading), rather than the construction of hypertexts (authoring). The project plans to produce a COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) using by integrating an ontological reasoning service with a Web-based Open Hypermedia link service to form a Conceptual Hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents. The bringing together of Open Hypermedia and Ontology services, can be seen as one particular implementation of the Semantic Web. Here we briefly present open and conceptual hypermedia, and introduce the architecture being employed within the COHSE project, and the prototype COHSE platform we have developed. We present the questions that we now plan to address that surround the Semantic Web when viewed from the perspective of a hypertext for people.