Toward the Fusion of the Web and Artificial Intelligence

Takahira Yamaguchi (Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering)

The World Wide Web (Web for short), proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, has now become so widespread that it has a major impact on individual lifestyles. However, the vision from 20 years ago included functions such as comparing the organizational structures of companies described on web pages and analyzing their differences, but these functions have not yet been realized.

Therefore, in recent years, the “Semantic Web” has been proposed, where software can understand the meaning of web pages by assigning keywords (called metadata) to them and developing electronic dictionaries (called ontologies) for software (rather than humans) to understand the meaning of this metadata. Research and development are underway in various countries. This represents a fusion of the Web and artificial intelligence (knowledge representation), and it is expected to enable a variety of web information analysis functions.

My laboratory is also advancing research on the Semantic Web. We have developed DODDLE-OWL, a tool that semi-automatically constructs ontologies from text, and have released it as open-source software (Figure 1 shows the generation of a legal ontology from legal text). Although many challenges remain, we are also promoting the research and development of semantic robot services, which fuse the Semantic Web with robotics, enabling multiple robots to cooperate while thinking in various ways (see Figure 2).

On another note, the Service Innovation educational course was launched this year at the Center for Open Systems Management, part of the School of Science for Open and Environmental Systems in the Graduate School of Science and Technology. This center was established with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as its parent organization. In cooperation with the Keio Business School and industry, this course aims to cultivate “service innovators” who can improve the productivity of the service industry and create new services (see Figure 3).

High school students today are truly “Web generation people,” having grown up alongside the development of the Web. In this educational course, I hope to cultivate students who can devise future-oriented web services with an eye on the next-generation Web. I encourage anyone who is interested to enroll in the Faculty of Science and Technology and the Graduate School of Science and Technology and get involved in the education and research of service innovation.

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