A Methodology for Conducting Knowledge Discovery on the Semantic Web

One of the most prominent features that the Semantic Web promises to enable is the discovery of new and implied knowledge from existing information that is scattered over the Internet. However, adding reasoning capabilities to the existing Web infrastructure is by no means a trivial task. Current methods and / or implementations do not seem to be declarative and expressive enough to provide the kind of reasoning support that the Semantic Web users will benefit from. In this paper we propose a methodology based on which, the user can construct and pose intelligent queries to Semantic Web documents in an intuitive manner, without prior knowledge of the document’s contents or structure. This methodology is implemented through a knowledge discovery prototype interface that relies on an existing inference engine found suitable for this task.