If your computer knows what you mean then you have arrived in web 3.0. Ontologybased technologies facilitate the search for and intelligent processing of information. We talked to Hans-Peter Schnurr, Managing Director of ontoprise GmbH, about the advantages and benefits open to companies using these technologies.

Hans-Peter Schnurr started his career in 1995 as a Practice Analyst in the TIME markets for McKinsey & Company. In 1998 he switched to the AIFB Institute at the University of Karlsruhe and took on responsibility for a European research project which laid the foundations of today’s ontology technologies and methods. In parallel to this he and his colleagues worked on the implementation of these technologies in concrete applications. This led to the formation of ontoprise GmbH in 1999 with Prof. Dr. Studer (Head of Research into Knowledge Management), Prof.Dr.Angele and Prof.Dr.Staab. Hans-Peter Schnurr is shareholder and managing director of this company.

Ontoprise is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and infrastructure for the production, integration, processing and maintenance of ontologies. These semantic technologies, which support computers in the simpler, faster, and more intuitive processing of information, are being implemented successfully in companies throughout the world.

DMR: Web 2.0 changed the use of the World Wide Web dramatically. Now everyone is wondering what is going to happen in web 3.0. What do you understand to be’ web 3.0’, and what is the role played by your company here?

H.-P. Schnurr: Web 3.0 is a combination of web 2.0 and the semantic web. The individual indexing and notation of multimedia documents and their online availability in web 2.0 has created immense social dynamics and now offers an impressive scientific infrastructure. But this wealth of information suffers from the fact that the web is primarily syntactic. The semantic web on the other hand formally defines the content of documents in the World Wide Web in the form of machine-readable data. Ontoprise provides the semantic infrastructure necessary for web 3.0 to be able to store, link and research these semantic data. By linking the content new aspects of it can come to light and intelligent search methods provided.  

DMR: Which advantages do web 3.0 technologies offer in comparison to web 2.0?

H.-P. Schnurr: Web 3.0 technologies complement web 2.0 technologies perfectly. In web 2.0 users are invited to contribute content and are supported in doing this. But the type of knowledge created in this way cannot be understood or further processed by the computer. Web 3.0 technologies make the content machine-readable, able to be analyzed automatically, and thus reusable through the use of indexing with so-called ‘ontologies’. Web 3.0 technologies also make it easier to combine knowledge from different sources. This makes mash-ups, for example, much easier to create.  So above and beyond the pure collection of knowledge its free combination is facilitated and Internet for Everyone comes one step closer. Through the ‘understanding’ of the content the search machines of the future will not only be able to deliver a list of documents that contain the search terms, but will be able to give an accurate answer to a specific question.

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