Semantic Interpretation of the Web without the Semantic Web: Toward Business-Aware Web Processors

In this paper, we describe a family of systems that we are developing to make systematic use of the Web in support of decision-makers. These systems, which we call business-aware web processors, use semantic representations but do not assume that these representations will come from the Semantic Web. We describe the relationship between our vision and the standard Semantic Web vision. We next present two prototype applications based on the approach that we have been developing to support decision-makers in two different contexts. We then describe the underlying technology platform we have been developing to support this family of applications, and the challenges we are confronting as we advance this research agenda.