Some reflections on knowledge representation in the semantic web

The knowledge representation technology Description Logics (DLs) has become an important component of developments around the Semantic Web. It is suggested here that in order to be really useful, the knowledge represented in DLs should in some fundamental way reflect the way the human mind organises and structures the same knowledge. There is a short historical review of some relevant background work in cognitive psychology, including WordNet. This is followed by a brief introduction to the importance of automatic classification in DLs before considering some issues around ontologies.