Syndication on the Web using a description logic approach

Syndication systems on the Web have attracted vast amounts of attention in recent years. As technologies have emerged and matured, there has been a transition to more expressive syndication approaches; that is, subscribers and publishers are provided with more expressive means of describing their interests and published content, enabling more accurate information filtering. In this paper, we formalize a syndication architecture that utilizes the Web Ontology Language ( OWL) and description logic reasoning for selective content dissemination. This provides finer grained control for filtering and automated reasoning for discovering implicit subscription matches, both of which are not achievable in less expressive approaches. We then address one of the main limitations with such a syndication approach, namely matching newly published information with subscription requests in an efficient and practical manner. To this end, we investigate incremental query answering for a large subset of OWL and present an approach to reduce the portion of the ontology that must be considered for query answering in the event of updates. Lastly, an evaluation of the query approach is shown, demonstrating its effectiveness for syndication purposes. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.