SEMANTIC WEB

Introduction
The development of the World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized the lives of human beings. It is an unlimited source of information which is accessed by millions of people throughout the world. Comprising of a network of hundreds of thousands of servers, the WWW has turned the world into a global village, where people interact, chat, share and do business with others located virtually anywhere in the world. The only downside is that the information present on the web is primarily human understandable and only machine readable. That means that whatever is present on the Web, the machines can read but have no idea what it means. For example, when we search for a particular topic on the Web using a search engine, although it results in thousands of web pages but only a handful of those are actually useful to us because the search engines look for the words that we typed and compare them to the pages on the web without actually understanding the meaning. To actually find a useful page we have to go through them manually and check them one by one to find what we were looking for. Obviously that is highly inefficient and time consuming. Although newer and better searching algorithms improve the relevance of the results, they can never completely rectify the problem. A complete solution of the problem lies in the development of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web is a type of intelligent web where the information contained can not only be read by the machines but also understood, interpreted and used directly in different applications without the need of human interpretation. When it comes to processing information, machines are extremely fast compared to human beings and if they can understand the information as well then that means the thousands of search results can filtered to only a few which are actually relevant, in an instant. The possibilities of Semantic Web are by no means limited to better search results. Development of the Semantic Web would revolutionize virtually everything

connected to the Web. However the implications on the field of education and teaching are very important and we will discuss only them here.

Importance in education and teaching

The Web is a valuable resource in the field of education. E-learning has become very popular these days and many universities across the world are offering different courses through the web. But in all of these the Web is merely used as a communications network while the teaching staff must be humans. Through the development of the Semantic Web we could use the Web not only as a communications network but as a completely autonomous teacher. There is tons of information available on the Web, in 2006 alone an estimated 1,350,000 articles were published in 23,750 journals worldwide (Bjrk, Roos, & Lauri, 2008). It would take a human being an eternity to process all that information. Semantic Web would not only allow processing that much information in a reasonable amount of time but also present it in a fashion that is understandable to the user. To use it as an educational resource we would use intelligent web based programs which will allow the users to take full advantage of the Semantic Web. These programs will emulate a classroom. Like a teacher, these programs will allow students to interact with the Web in a humanly fashion. Student models will be developed which will allow keeping track of the progress of the students and allowing helpful feedback on an individual scale to be provided to the students. Lectures will be delivered to the students like normal classrooms except the teacher will be an AI based program with the Web as the source of all the knowledge. With the vast collection of knowledge archives, the web would become the ultimate teacher. Students will also be able to interact with each other and also put forward questions. The questions will be answered relevant to the topic and according to the student model so that each student can easily understand them.

Semantic Web Development

There are four major parts which have to be considered in order to create to working and stable Semantic Web, which are

Language Ontologies Services Semantic Markup

Languages
In order for the machines to understand the information and use it for different applications we need to define a standard language to represent the information. It would be like other computer languages and yet comprehensive enough to accommodate a large variety of human languages. We must agree on syntax of this language as well so different machines can correctly interpret the data and also use it directly in various applications. Also the language must support expansion and evolution as human languages continuously evolve. There are a lot of such languages around. Some of them are higher-level ones, others are lower-level. One way or another, most of them are based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), XML Schemas, RDF (Resource Definition Framework), and RDF Schemas, all four developed under the auspices of W3C and using XML syntax.

Ontologies
Ontology comprises a set of knowledge terms, including the vocabulary, the semantic interconnections, and some simple rules of inference and logic for some particular topic. It is like a dictionary except that machines consult it instead of humans to understand the information present on the Web. Ontologies are represented using ontology representation languages. Semantic Web requires the ontologies to be well defined and only a few so that different interpreting agents can easily read and interpret data belonging to separate classes.

There are a number of high level ontology representation languages such as OWL(Web Ontology Language), RDF/RDFs etc. which are used to develop new ontologies as well as modify the old ones.

Services
Intelligent, high-level services like information brokers, search agents, information filters, intelligent information integration, and knowledge management, are what the users want from the Semantic Web. They are possible if only a number of ontologies are present on the Web otherwise it would be difficult for the interpreting agents to correctly decode and understand the information present on the Web. Different classes of information will require different ontologies and the agents must know how to use those ontologies in the services provided by the Semantic Web. For example, if the service is to locate a certain bibliographical item from a digital library, the agent should know how to find the librarys Web page, invoke the searching procedure, how to pass the arguments and what to expect from the results of the search. Then the user will be notified according to these results.

Semantic Markup
Ontologies merely serve to standardize and provide interpretations for Web content, but are not enough to build the Semantic Web. To make Web content machine-understandable, Web pages and documents themselves must contain semantic markup, i.e. annotations which use the terminology that one or more ontologies define and contain pointers to the network of ontologies, Semantic markup gives the relation between different classes of information and ontologies and provides the necessary linkage for the agents to understand the access this relation. They also provide the context in which the ontologies are being used. Semantic markup persists with the document or the page published on the Web, and is saved as part of the file representing the document/page. Services also must be properly marked up, to make them computer-interpretable, useapparent, and agent-ready. They must contain pointers to the corresponding service ontologies. The annotation is done by using appropriate tools. These tools can be part-of or integrated with ontology-authoring tools, such as OIL tools (Fensel et al., 2001). They can also be standalone tools, such as the Knowledge Annotator tool (Hendler & Heflin, 2001).

Limitations
As with all things certain problems impede the development of the Semantic Web. The chief being that primarily all the information present on the Web at this time is not machine understandable. And to make it so we have to represent all the documents in the constraints defined above. That would require a lot of time. Also the development of the AI required for the Semantic Web is still not mature enough to support such an extensive application. However advancements in the field of computers have always exceeded expectations and it is quite possible that we would see the Semantic Web emerging in the near future.

References
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 14 (2004) 39-65 www.w3.org www.semanticweb.org www.wikipedia.org