Abstract:

The semantic web remains in the early stages of development. It
has not yet achieved the goals envisioned by its founders as a
pervasive web of distributed knowledge and intelligence. Success
will be attained when a dynamic synergism can be created between
people and a sufficient number of infrastructure systems and tools
for the semantic web in analogy with those for the original web.
The domain name system, web browsers, and the benefits of
publishing web pages motivated many people to register domain
names and publish web sites on the original web. An analogous
resource label system, semantic search applications, and the
benefits of collaborative semantic networks will motivate people
to register resource labels and publish resource descriptions on
the semantic web. The Domain Ontology Oriented Resource System
(DOORS) and Problem Oriented Registry of Tags And Labels (PORTAL)
are proposed as infrastructure systems for resource metadata
within a paradigm that can serve as a bridge between the original
web and the semantic web. IRIS registers domain names while DNS
publishes domain addresses with mapping of names to addresses for
the original web. Analogously, PORTAL registers resource labels
and tags while DOORS publishes resource locations and descriptions
with mapping of labels to locations for the semantic web. BioPORT
is proposed as a prototype PORTAL registry specific for the
problem domain of biomedical computing.