The Semantic Web
Definition
The Semantic Web is a current project under the direction of Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium to extend the ability of the World Wide Web by developing standards and tools that allow meaning to be added to the content of webpages. The goal of the semantic web is to create a universal medium for the exchange of data by allowing meaning to be given, using tools and tags, to the content within webpages.Currently the world wide web contains HTML, which is a language that is useful for displaying graphics and text but does not lend any meaning to the content it describes. The semantic web will address this issue by allowing content to be described in XML documents using tools like RDF and OWL which are types of tags. These description tags that lend meaning to the content facilitates automated information gathering and research by computers.
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The usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources will be enhanced through:
- documents 'marked up' with semantic information (an extension of the tags used in today's Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-readable information about the human-readable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site).
- (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about people, places, ideas, cats etc.)
- common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of 'the Author of the page' won't be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject of a book review).
- automated agents to perform tasks for users of the Semantic Web using this metadata
- web-based services (often with agents of their own) to supply information specifically to agents (for example, a Trust service that an agent could ask if some online store has a history of poor service or spamming).
The primary facilitators of this technology are: URIs (which identify resources) along with XML and Namespaces. These, together with a bit of logic form RDF, which can be used to say anything about anything. As well as RDF, many other technologies such as Topic Maps and pre-web AI technologies are likely to contribute to the Semantic Web.
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web, Apr 2004
Semantic Web
Definition: The Semantic Web is the representation of data on the World Wide Web. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming."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." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001
Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Management () - John Davies
With the current changes driven by the expansion of the World Wide Web, this book uses a different approach from other books on the market: it applies ontologies to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal theories supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to explicitly represent semantics of semi-structured information. These enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Methodology and tools are developed for intelligent access to large volumes of semi-structured and textual information sources in intra- and extra-, and internet-based environments to employ the full power of ontologies in supporting knowledge management from the information client perspective and the information provider.
The aim of the book is to support efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources. It is aimed primarily at researchers in the area of knowledge management and information retrieval and will also be a useful reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level and for business managers who are aiming to increase the corporations information infrastructure.
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