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Chapter I
Semantic Approach to
Knowledge Representation
and Processing
Mladen Stanojević
The Mihailo Pupin Institute, Belgrade, Serbia
Sanja Vraneš
The Mihailo Pupin Institute, Belgrade, Serbia
Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
AbstrAct
In this chapter, several knowledge representation and processing techniques based on a symbolic and
semantic approach are briely described. The majority of present-day techniques, like the relational da-
tabase model or OWL (Web Ontology Language), is based on the symbolic approach and supports the
representation and processing of semantically related knowledge. Although these two techniques have
found many successful applications, there are certain limitations in their wider use, stemming from the
use of naming in explicit description of the meaning of the represented knowledge. To overcome these
limitations, the authors propose a technique based on the semantic approach, Hierarchical Semantic
Form (HSF), that uses semantic contexts to implicitly deine the meaning. This chapter irst provides
concise information about the two most popular techniques and their limitations, and then proposes
a new technique based on semantic approach, which facilitates a large scale processing of semantic
knowledge represented in natural language documents.
IntroductIon
Seven years have passed since the idea of Semantic
Web was introduced. In the meantime, many on-
tology and schema languages have been proposed
and many Semantic Web and other processing
techniques have been introduced, which provide
a functionality needed for semantic knowledge