Metalog - towards the Semantic Web

[Nearby: Semantic Web Made Easy - PNL - Download - Quick Guide - History - People - Todo's]

News: Metalog v2.1 (with Macintosh support) forthcoming, stay tuned!
News: New research paper on Metalog published.
News: Due to high user demand, the Quick Guide is now also available online.

Metalog is a next-generation reasoning system for the Semantic Web. Historically, Metalog has been the first semantic web system to be designed, introducing reasoning within the Semantic Web infrastructure by adding the query/logical layer on top of RDF.

Why?

What is Metalog good for?

To showcase the potential of the Semantic Web
To teach the Semantic Web
To understand how reasoning on the Web can work
To bring the user in the loop, by making the Semantic Web easier

Design

The design of Metalog comes from the need of blending two necessities of the Semantic Web:

The first one is reasoning, that is to say, the ability to reason, query, express logical relations. In other words, to do some "thinking" on the Web.
The second one is to try to make the Semantic Web Easy, or at least to start this quest.

Therefore, Metalog has a double face: a powerful reasoning extension on one hand, and a very user-friendly interface on the other, which constitutes another possible level in the Semantic Web hierarchy: the so-called pseudo natural language (PNL) layer. The PNL (despite its hard name!) makes much easier for everybody to understand the Semantic Web, without having to learn heavy geek-like formalisms: essentially, the way the user interacts is via English-like dialogues, where one can "read" and "write" without having to learn a new different language.

Downloads

The Metalog system is available both for Windows and for Linux platforms. A Macintosh porting is on the way. Check the download page for details and to get the latest Metalog distribution.

Documentation

Every Metalog distribution comes complete with a Quick Guide. There is also the paper Towards a People's Web: Metalog that gives a more technical introdution to the Metalog system, and its future developments.

You can check out the history of the project.

Contacts/Feedback

Comments, suggestions and contributions regarding Metalog are welcomed (Metalog is an open-source project, so everybody is welcome to join and help). Any request or feedback about Metalog can be sent to metalog@w3.org . If you want, you can have a look at the people behind Metalog.

A list of todo's is maintained as well, planning what are the next things on the Metalog agenda.