Semantic Web

Introduction
Reference: Peter Mike, Social
Networks and the Semantic Web
 Introduction
• Most of the web’s content is designed for humans to
read and not for computer programs to process
meaningfully.
• Computer programs can
- parse the web pages
- perform routine processing
• In general, they have no reliable method to understand
and process the semantics.
• The Semantic Web brings structure to the meaningful
content of the web pages, creating an environment
where software agents roaming from page to page
carry out sophisticated tasks for users.
 Introduction (cont’d)
• The Semantic Web is a major research initiative
of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to
create a metadata-rich Web of resources that
can describe themselves not only by how they
should be displayed (HTML) or syntactically (XML),
but also by the meaning of the metadata.
• “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,
 Introduction (cont’d)
• In the traditional web difficulties to find,
present, access, or maintain available
electronic information on the web
• Need for a data representation to enable
software products (agents) to provide
intelligent access to heterogeneous and
distributed information.
 The Semantic Web: why?
• Difficulty in searching on the Web
– due to the way in which information is stored on the
Web
• Problem 1: Web documents do not distinguish
between information content and presentation
(“solved” by XML)
• Problem 2: Different web documents may
represent in different ways semantically related
pieces of information
• This leads to hard problems for “intelligent”
information search on the Web
Separating content and presentation
• Problem 1: web documents do not distinguish
between information content and
presentation
– problem due to the HTML language
– problem “solved” by technologies like
• stylesheets (HTML, XML)
• XML
– Stylesheets allow for separating formatting attributes from
the information presented
 XML
• XML: eXtensible Mark-up Language
• XML documents are written through a user defined set
of tags
• XML lets everyone to create their own tags.
• These tags can be used by the scripts in sophisticated
ways to perform various tasks, but the script writer has
to know what the page writer uses each tag for.
– XML allows to add arbitrary structure to the documents
but says nothing about what the structures mean.
• It has no built mechanism to convey the meaning of
the user’s new tags to other users.
 XML: example
• HTML:
<H1>Seminar on Data Analytics </H1>
<UL>
<LI>Teacher: Max Plank
<LI>Room: 7
<LI>Prerequisites: none
</UL>
• XML:
<course>
<title> Seminar on Data Analytics </title>
<teacher> Max Plank </teacher>
<room> 7 </room>
<prereq> none</prereq>
</course>
 Limitations of XML
• XML does not solve all the problems:
– different XML documents may express
information with the same meaning using
different tags
 The need for a “Semantic” Web
• Problem 2: Different web documents may
represent in different ways semantically related
pieces of information
– different XML documents do not share the semantics
of information
• Idea: annotate (mark-up) pieces of information to
express the “meaning” of such a piece of
information
- the meaning of such tags is shared
shared semantics
 The Semantic Web initiative
• The Semantic Web provides a common
framework that allows data to be shared and
reused across application, enterprise and
community boundaries.
• Published using languages specifically
designed for data:
– Resource Description Framework (RDF)
– Web Ontology Language (OWL)
– Extensible Markup Language (XML)
 Example
• An example of a tag that would be used in a
non-semantic web page:
<item> blog </item>
• Encoding similar information in a semantic web
page might look like this:

<item rdf:about="http://example.org/blog/"> blog </item>

The Semantic Web Tower
 The Semantic Web Layers
• XML layer
• RDF + RDFS layer
• Ontology layer
• Proof-rule layer
• Trust layer
 The XML layer
• XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
- user-definable and domain-specific
markup
• URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)
– universal naming for Web resources
– same URI => same resource
• URIs are the “ground terms” of the SW
 Resource Description Framework (RDF)
• A scheme for defining information on the web.
• It provides the technology for expressing the meaning of
terms and concepts in a form that computers can readily
process.
• Framework for describing metadata (data describing the web
resources).
• RDF encodes this information on the XML page in sets of
triples.
• The triple is an information on the web about related things.
• Each triple is a combination of Subject, Verb and Object,
similar to an elementary sentence.
• Subjects, Verbs and Objects are each identified by a URI,
which enable anyone to define a new concept/new verb just
by defining a URI for it somewhere on the web.
 Resource Description Framework
(RDF)
• RDF has following important concepts:

– Resource : The resources being described by RDF are anything that

can be named via a URI.

– Property : A property is also a resource that has a name, for

instance Author or Title.

– Statement : A statement consists of the combination of a Resource,

a Property, and an associated value.
 The RDF + RDFS layer
• RDF model = set of RDF triples
• triple = expression (statement)
(subject, predicate, object)
– subject = resource
– predicate = property (of the resource)
– object = value (of the property)
 The RDF + RDFS layer
• Triples can be written using XML tags as shown
<contact rdf:about=“edumbill”>
<name>Edd Dumbill</name>
<role>Managing Director</role>
<organization>XML.com</organization>
</contact>

Subject Verb Object

doc.xml#edumbill http://w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type http://example.org/contact

doc.xml#edumbill http://example.org/name “Edd Dumbill”

doc.xml#edumbill http://example.org/role “Managing Director”

doc.xml#edumbill http://example.organization “XML.com”

 RDF Schema
• RDF Schema is an extension of Resource
Description Framework.
• RDF Schema provides a higher level of abstraction
than RDF.
– specific classes of resources
– specific properties
– relationships between these properties and other
resources can be described.
• RDFS allows specific resources to be described as
instances of more general classes
 The RDF + RDFS layer
• RDFS = RDF Schema
• example:
 Limitations of RDF/RDFS
• No standard for expressing primitive data
types such as integer, etc.
• All data types in RDF/RDFS are treated as
strings.
• No standard for expressing relations of
properties (unique, transitive etc.)
• No standard to express equivalence,
disjointedness etc. among properties
 The Ontology layer
• Ontologies are collections of statements written in a language such as RDF that
define relations between concepts and specifies logical rules for reasoning about
them.

• Computers/agents/services will understand the meaning of semantic data on a

web page by following links to specified ontologies.

• Ontologies can express a large number of relationships among entities (objects) by

assigning properties to classes and allowing subclasses to inherit such properties.

• An Ontology may express the rule,

If City Code State Code

and Address City Code then Address
State Code
 The Ontology layer
• ontology = shared conceptualization
(more expressive than RDF + RDFS)
• Expressed in a true knowledge representation
language
• OWL (Web Ontology Language) = standard
language for ontologies
 OWL
• Web Ontology Language (OWL) is another effort developed by the OWL
working group of the W3Consorsium.
• OWL is divided following sub languages.
• OWL Lite
• OWL (Description Logics) DL
• OWL Full

• OWL Lite is a subset of OWL DL, which in turn is a subset of OWL Full.
 The proof/rule layer
Beyond OWL:
• Rule: informal notion
• Rules are used to perform inference over
ontologies
• Rules -> a tool for capturing further
knowledge
(not expressible in OWL ontologies )
 The Trust layer
• SW top layer:
– where does the information come from?
– how is this information obtained?
– can I trust this information?
Ontologies: example
Evolution of Semantic Web
The Semantic Web Tower