Ontology Supported Information Systems: A Review.

The exponential growth of information on the web far exceeds the capacity of present day information retrieval
systems and search engines, making information integration on the web difficult. In order to overcome this, semantic
web technologies were proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to achieve a higher degree
of automation and precision in information retrieval systems. Semantic web, with its promise to deliver machine
understanding to the traditional web, has attracted a significant amount of research from academia as well as
from industries. Semantic web is an extension of the current web in which data can be shared and reused across
the internet. RDF and ontology are two essential components of the semantic web architecture which support
a common framework for data storage and representation of data semantics, respectively. Ontologies being the
backbone of semantic web applications, it is more relevant to study various approaches in their application, usage,
and integration into web services. In this article, an effort has been made to review the research work being undertaken
in the area of design and development of ontology supported information systems. This paper also briefly
explains the emerging semantic web technologies and standards.