Objectives of knowledge management

Semantic web standards
The 
semantic web
is a concept promoted by Tim Berners- Lee and the World Wide Web 
Consortium (www.w3.org) to improve upon the capabilities of the current World Wide 
Web. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and linguistic expressions. For 
example, the word ‘father’ has the semantic elements male, human and parent and ‘girl’ has 
the elements female, human and young. The semantic web is about how to define mean-
ing for the content of the web to make it easier to locate relevant information and services 
rapidly. As mentioned above, finding information on a particular topic through search-
ing the web is inexact since there isn’t a standard way of describing the content of web 
pages. The semantic web describes the use of metadata through standards such as XML, 
RDF and the Dublin Core to help users find web resources more readily. Another benefit of 
the semantic web is that it will enable data exchange between software 
agents
running on 
different server or client computers.
Agents are software programs created to assist humans in performing tasks. In this con-
text they automatically gather information from the Internet or exchange data with other 
agents based on parameters supplied by the user.
Semantic web
Interrelated content 
including data with 
defined meaning, 
enabling better exchange 
of information between 
computers and between 
people and computers.
Agents
Software programs that 
can assist humans by 
automatically gathering 
information from the 
Internet or exchanging 
data with other agents 
based on parameters 
supplied by the user.
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Part 1
Introduction
The applications of the semantic web are best illustrated through examples. Berners- Lee 
et al
. (2001) give the example of a patient seeking medical treatment for a particular condi-
tion. They envisage a patient having a personal software agent (effectively a search engine) 
which is used to find the best source of treatment. The patient’s agent will interact with the 
doctor’s agent which will describe the symptoms and search pages from different health-
care providers which detail their services. The patient’s agent will then give them the differ-
ent treatment options in terms of cost, effectiveness, waiting time and location. Similarly, 
a personal agent could be used to find the best flight or a business agent could be used to