Enabling agent architecture through an RDF query and inference engine

Abstract

Over the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of heterogeneous information sources, mainly due to the rise of the Internet. In order to select the desired information, large quantities of information must be searched and examined. Various AI techniques are available for such tasks, relying on information semantics. To implement these techniques on a variety of platforms, a common basis for the interchange of semantic information must be defined. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a model for the description of semantic information which is suitable for application on the Internet, and it is based on the semantic network model. It should, however, be noted that this model does not provide any means for querying RDF data. In this paper, we propose a model for querying RDF knowledge bases and its accompanying syntax based on XML. The model has been implemented and tested in practice.