Toward a New Generation of Semantic Web Applications

First-generation Semantic Web applications typically use one ontology—or at most, a few—that ontology engineers built, selected, and integrated at design time. In contrast, the next generation of Semantic Web applications will dynamically exploit the Semantic Web as a large-scale source of distributed knowledge. The authors have implemented several next-generation applications and have gained, in the process, insights about the Semantic Web's current status, strengths, and limitations. An analysis of their initial results also indicates near-future directions for the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming challenges and opportunities. This article is part of a special issue called Semantic Web Update.