A Solid Foundation of Semantic Computing toward Next-generation Web

Professor Mitsuru Ishizuka
(Department of Creative Informatics)

Professor Ishizuka is promoting an approach of “Semantic Computing” in parallel with its international standardization for Next-generation Web. It allows computers to understand the semantic meaning expressed in texts, and thereby to organize and retrieve the vast amount of information referring to the semantics. The Web has grown to an indispensable platform for global information flow and sharing. Vast Web information is typically retrieved through search engines, which currently use only the surface level of Web information, such as keyword matching and its slight extensions. By understanding the semantics of the Web contents like humans do, the Web can become a more creative platform.

The core technology of Professor Ishizuka' s semantic computing is a universal concept description language called CDL (Concept Description Language), in which a semantic concept of text is expressed basically with elementary entities corresponding lexical word senses and pre-defined relation labels between two connecting entities. CDL can also become a common medium for information flow and exchange beyond language barrier. While there are many researches regarding Semantic Web which encodes the metadata of the Web contents into a machine understandable form, his approach is different from these researches and unique in the world. He and his colleagues are striving to make CDL an international standard. His activity is expected to strengthen the Japan' s status and competitiveness in IT field.

“We would like to make a substantial original contribution to lay a solid foundation toward next-generation Web.” ---- Professor Ishizuka has a global view on the Web technology.