From E-Parliament Wiki
SEMANTIC WEB
The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content. It derives from World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. The definition given by Tim Berners-Lee (2001) is: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation". In the legal field, the trend is to move from text-based web into semantic web: this means that legal information available over the internet is increasingly processed according to its content or meaning, and not only as a pure sequence of worlds. This result is usually achieved by embedding in the natural language text, special computer readable specifications which can be processed in several ways: for retrieving documents, for accessing related information, for determining its currently binding content, for applying the rules it includes, for indexing documents according to conceptual analysis of the concerned legal domain, and so on.
METADATA
Metadata (meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is "data about other data”. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels.
There are more complex definitions, such as the one given by American Library Association (Task Force on Metadata Summary Report, June 1999): "Metadata is structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information-bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, and management of the described entities".
Metadata are human readable and machine understandable. They are split into categories concerning specific domain: they can be objective or subjective, authorial (made by the author of the text) or documental (made by various editors), metadata of text and metadata of process (workflow, lifecycle, protocol, security). Metadata can either describe the resource itself (for example, name and size of a file) or the content of the resource.
In the legal field, a rich and complete set of metadata can be used for more than mere on-screen display of the legal document. Additional applications of metadata include identification of documents, classification of normative content, consolidation of current and intermediate version of a legislative document, workflow description and summary, preservation management, juridical analysis for scholarly and comparative studies and so on.
Metadata would be labeled and collected according to a common "ontology", fundamental to provide a way for managing, organizing and comparing metadata.
ONTOLOGY
In philosophy, it regards the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
In computer science, ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain. That is, it describe, in a formalized way, a domain of knowledge, by means of concept, object classes (and their proprieties) and the relations among these.