Semantic technologies

Today, the Internet provides us with a vast amount of information. The amount of information and the number of users are rapidly increasing, and the use of the information is changing. However, the difficulties when trying to harness and extract relevant and correct information hinder efficient usage of it. In addition there is an increasing amount of B2B or B2C services available on the net. Developers of applications using such services are now faced with similar problems. How can they:

• discover and reuse existing available services,
• integrate services developed in different context in a efficient way, and
• how can we get the system to propose and adapt service compositions as new services become available or old services no longer exist?

There is a need for developing better technology that take the underlying semantics into account.

The research group on semantic services works with natural language processing and service composition technology. 

• With respect to natural language processing we have in particular worked with Portuguese language technology and lead the Linguateca project. 
• With respect to service composition technology,  we do research on Semantic Web Services in general and service composition in particular.