Science and the Semantic Web

摘要

Scientists have become increasingly reliant on the World Wide Web for supporting their research endeavors. The Web is used for finding preprints and papers in online repositories, for participating in online discussions at sites such as Science Online, for accessing databases through specialized Web interfaces, and even for ordering scientific supplies. When searching for a specific Web site or a paper on a particular topic, engines like Google can do a phenomenal job of sorting through billions of possibilities and identifying potentially useful candidates, often within the first few search results. On specialized Web sites, domain-specific search engines can do even better, for example, enabling the mathematician to easily find papers on "symplectic geometry" or the physicist to see preprints relating to "mesoscopic systems and the quantum hall effect." In fact, the Web has become indispensible for supporting the traditional communications within our disciplines and the needs of scientists within their disciplinary boundaries.