A Semantic eScience Portal for International Scientific and Academic Cooperation

Currently the so-called “Web 2.0” is at its peak and new ways of web based collaboration methods and business models are being implemented. The standardization requirements for the "Web 3.0" or Semantic Web – being RDF (Resource Description Language) and SPARQL – are in place. However real-world applications are still rare. There are two main reasons for this circumstance. First the scope of the W3C's semantic web standardizations is broad. It not only propagates a significant technological shift but also implies human coordination effort when agreeing on shared ontology's. Second the semantic data model constitutes a "data graph" which implies a significant impedance mismatch when used on top of relational database based triple-stores. The first issue is now tackled by introducing an intermediate step through so-called "linked-data" (see linkeddata.org). This step focuses on the "technical" aspects when linking data elements to each other, postponing the "semantic" challenges which come with a holistic approach to ontology creation and reasoning (Halevy, 2009). The second issue is addressed by grid computing engines which potentially eliminate the bottleneck inherent in database systems and architectures.