Semantic Web

Instructor

Dr. Prakash Sharma

Assistant Professor, SCIT, Manipal University Jaipur
Semantic Web - new Possibilities for Intelligent Web
Applications

2
 Challenges of Current Web

 Flat Text

 Dummy Information

 Repeated Information

 Accuracy of Resultant Information

3
 Need of Semantic Web

 Information Overload

 Poor Content Aggregation

 Automated Interoperability and Knowledge Sharing

 Flexible Information Modeling

4
 Current web vs Semantic Web

 The Web was designed as an information space, with the

goal that it should be useful not only for human-human
communication, but also that machines would be able to
participate and help.
 In conventional www era, Web pages are designed to be
read by people, not machines.
 The Semantic Web is a vision of information that is
understandable by computers, so that they can perform
more of the tedious works involved in finding, sharing
and combining information on the web.
 The semantic web provides a common standard (RDF) for
websites to publish the relevant information in a more
readily machine-processable and integratable form. 5
 What is Semantic Web?
• The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide
Web in which the semantics of information and services on the
web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and
satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the Web content.

• Semantic Web derives from W3C director Tim Berners –Lee. His
vision of the Web as a universal medium for data ,information and
knowledge exchange.

• Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic

web as follows – “I have a dream for the Web, in which computers
become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content,
links, and transactions between people and computers. A
“Semantic Web”, which should make this possible, has yet to
emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade,6
bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines
 WWW Vs Semantic Web
1. The World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in
Hypertext Markup Language(HTML), a markup convention that
is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia
objects such as images and interactive forms. Whereas The
semantic web involves publishing the data in a language,
Resource Description Framework (RDF) specifically for data, so
that it can be manipulated and combined just as can data files on a
local computer.
2. The HTML language describes documents and the links between
them. RDF, by contrast, describes arbitrary things such as people,
meetings, and airplane parts.

7
 Metadata
The first form of semantic data on the Web was metadata : ―data
about data. These basically include:
• Means of creation of the data
• Purpose of the data
• Time and date of creation
• Creator or author of data
• Placement on a computer network where the data was created
• Standards used
Example :
A meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the
HTML page.
<meta name="keywords"content="wikipedia,encyclopedia">
Default charset for plain text is simply set with meta:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8" >

8
Semantic Web Layered architecture/
Semantic Web Stack

9
Semantic Web Layered architecture

10
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC
WEB
URI/Unicode:
•Unicode and URI: Unicode, the standard for computer character representation, and
URIs, the standard for identifying and locating resources (such as pages on the Web),
provide a baseline for representing characters used in most of the languages in the world, and
for identifying resources.
•To identify items on the Web, we use identifiers. Because each item identified is
considered a "resource," we call these identifiers "Uniform Resource Identifiers". We can
give a URI to anything, and anything that has a URI can be said to be "on the Web“.

•For example: the book you bought last week, the fly that keeps buzzing in your ear and
anything else you can think of -- they all can have a URI.

•One can classify URIs as locators (URLs), or as names (URNs), or as both. A Uniform
Resource Name (URN) functions like a person's name, while a Uniform Resource Locator
(URL) resembles that person's street address. In other words: the URN defines an item's
identity, while the URL provides a method for finding it.

11
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC
WEB
XML:
•XML was designed to be a simple way to send documents across the Web. It allows anyone
to design their own document format and then write a document in that format. These
document formats can include markup to enhance the meaning of the document's content.
This markup is "machine-readable," that is, programs can read and understand it. By
including machine-readable meaning in our documents, we make them much more powerful.

•Example
I just got a new pet dog.
As far as our computer is concerned, this is just text. It has no particular meaning to the
computer. But now consider this same passage marked up using an XML-based markup
language (we'll make one up for this example):
<sentence>
<person href="http://aaronsw.com/"> I </person> just got a new pet <animal> dog
</animal>.
</sentence>

12
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC
WEB
XML:
•Example
For example, we can rewrite our example thus:
<sentence>
<person href="http://aaronsw.com">I</person> just got a new pet<animal type="dog"
href="http://aaronsw.com/myDog">dog</animal>.
</sentence>

13
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC WEB

RDF:
•The most fundamental building block is Resource Description Framework(RDF), a format
for defining information on the web.

•The Semantic Web uses RDF to describe web resources. RDF provides a model for data,
and a syntax so that independent parties can exchange and use it. It is designed to be read and
understood by computers. It is not designed for being displayed to people.

•Once information is in RDF form, it becomes easy to process it, since RDF is a generic
format, which already has many parsers.

•An RDF statement is a lot like a simple sentence, except that almost all the words are URIs.
Each RDF statement has three parts: a subject, a predicate and an object. Let's look at a
simple RDF statement:
<http://aaron.com/>
<http://love.example.org/terms/reallyLikes>
<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/> .

14
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC WEB

RDFS:
•A "schema" is simply a document or piece of code that controls a set of terms in another
document or piece of code. It's like a master checklist.

•A schema is a way to describe the meaning and relationships of terms. This description (in
RDF, of course) helps computer systems use terms more easily, and decide how to convert
between them.

•RDF Schema was designed to be a simple datatyping model for RDF.

•Using RDF Schema, we can say that "Fido" is a type of "Dog", and that "Dog" is a sub class
of animal. We can also create properties and classes, as well as doing some slightly more
"advanced" stuff such as creating ranges and domains for properties.

15
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC WEB
OWL:
a richer language for providing more complex constraints on the types of resources and their
properties.

Ontology:
•In philosophy, an ontology is a theory about the nature of existence, of what types of things
exist. Artificial-intelligence and Web researchers have co-opted the term for their own
jargon, and for them an ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relations
among terms.
•An ontology is an explicit description of a domain. It includes
 Concepts
 properties and attributes of concepts
 constraints on properties and attributes
 individuals (often, but not always)

•An ontology defines a common vocabulary, a shared understanding.

•The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules.
The taxonomy defines classes of objects and relations among them. Inference rules allows to
infer conclusions based on rules and facts available in the knowledge base. So this increases
16
the power of Semantic web even more.
 MAIN COMPONENTS OF SEMANTIC WEB

Proof:
•Once we begin to build systems that follow logic, it makes sense to use them to prove
things.
•People all around the world could write logic statements. Then your machine could follow
these Semantic "links" to construct proofs.
•It is generally not required as the information on web does not require to be proved.

Trust: Digital Signatures and Web of Trust

•Based on work in mathematics and cryptography, digital signatures provide proof that a
certain person wrote a document or statement. So one digitally sign all of their RDF
statements. That way, we can be sure that he wrote them (or at least vouch for their
authenticity). Now, we can simply tell our program whose signatures to trust and whose not
to.
.

17
Semantic Web Architecture

You
are
here

18
 Main goals of the Semantic
Web?
 The Semantic Web is a Web of data. There is a lot of data
we all use every day, and it's not part of the Web.

 For example, I can see my bank statements on the web,

and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a
calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see
what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank
statement lines in a calendar? Why not?

 Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is

controlled by applications, and each application keeps it
to itself.
19
 Main goals of the Semantic
Web?
 The vision of the Semantic Web is to extend principles of
the Web from documents to data.

 Data should be accessed using the general Web

architecture using, URI-s; data should be related to one
another just as documents are already.

 This also means creation of a common framework that

allows data to be shared and reused across application,
enterprise, and community boundaries, to be processed
automatically by tools as well as manually, including
revealing possible new relationships among pieces of data.
20
 Application of the Semantic Web?
 Semantic Web technologies can be used in a variety of application
areas; for example:
 in data integration, whereby data in various locations and various
formats can be integrated in one, seamless application;
 in resource discovery and classification to provide better, domain
specific search engine capabilities;
 in cataloging for describing the content and content relationships
available at a particular Web site, page, or digital library;
by intelligent software agents to facilitate knowledge sharing and
exchange;
 in content rating;
 in describing collections of pages that represent a single logical
“document”;
 for describing intellectual property rights of Web pages and in many
others.
21
 Application of the Semantic Web?
 Various application areas, implementers, developers, etc, would
emphasize different aspects of Semantic Web technologies. This
wide range of applications include
 data integration,
 knowledge representation and analysis,
 cataloguing services,
 improving search algorithms and methods,
 social networks, etc.

22
Major building blocks of the Semantic Web?
 define and describe the relations among data (i.e., resources) on the
Web.

 the hyperlinks defines a relationship between the current page and

the target.

 One major difference is that, on the Semantic Web, such

relationships can be established between any two resources, there is
no notion of “current” page.

23
Major building blocks of the Semantic Web?
 Another major difference is that the relationship (i.e, the link) itself
is named, whereas the link used by a human on the (traditional)
Web is not and their role is deduced by the human reader.

 RDF, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of the

Semantic Web, gives a formal definition for that interchange.

24
Major building blocks of the Semantic Web?
 Tools to have a finer and more detailed classification and
characterization of those relationships as well as the resources being
characterized. (E.g., RDF Schemas, OWL, SKOS)

 For more complex cases, tools are available to define logical

relationships among resources and their relationships (for example,
if a relationships binds a person to his/her email address, it is
feasible to declare that the email address is unique, ie, the address is
not shared by several persons).

25
 Will I “see” the Semantic Web in my
everyday browser?
 Not necessarily, at least not directly. The Semantic Web
technologies may act behind the scenes, resulting in a better user
experience, rather than directly influencing the “look” on the
browser.

 This is already happening: there are Web Sites (e.g., Sun’s white
paper collection site, or Nokia’s support portal for their S60 series
device, Oracle’s virtual press room, Harper’s online magazine, or
Yahoo!’s Finance portal) that use Semantic Web technologies in the
background.

26
 Is the Semantic Web just research, or
does it have industrial applications?
 At present, the Semantic Web is increasingly used by small and
large business. Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Software AG, or Yahoo! are
only some of the large corporations that have picked up this
technology already and are selling tools as well as complete business
solutions.

 Large application areas, like the Health Care and Life Sciences, look
at the data integration possibilities of the Semantic Web as one of
the technologies that might offer significant help in solving their
R&D problems.

27
How is the Semantic Web related to
the existing Web?
 The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web and not its
replacement. Islands of RDF and possibly related ontologies can be
developed incrementally.

 Major application areas (like Health Care and Life Sciences) may
choose to “locally” adopt Semantic Web technologies, and this can
then spread over the Web in general.

 In other words, one should not think in terms of “rebuilding” the

Web.

28
 How does the Semantic Web relate to
Artificial Intelligence?
 Some parts of the Semantic Web technologies are based on results of
Artificial Intelligence research, like knowledge representation (e.g.,
for ontologies or rules), model theory (e.g., for the precise semantics
of RDF and RDF Schemas), or various types of logics (e.g., for rules).
However, it must be noted that Artificial Intelligence has a number of
research areas (e.g., image recognition) that are completely orthogonal
to the Semantic Web.

 It is also true that the development of the Semantic Web brought some
new perspectives to the Artificial Intelligence community: the “Web
effect”, i.e., the merge of knowledge coming from different sources,
usage of URIs, the necessity to reason with incomplete data; etc.29
 How does the Semantic Web relate to
XML? XML vs RDF
 One of XML’s strengths is its ability to describe strict hierarchies.

 XML is not an easy tool for data integration. On the other hand,
RDF consists of a very loose set of relations (triples). Due to its
usage of URIs it is very easy to seamlessly merge triple sets, ie, data
described in RDF within the same application; it is therefore ideal
for the integration of possibly heterogenous information on the Web.
But this has its price: reconstructing hierarchies from RDF may
become quite complex.

30
 How does the Semantic Web relate to
XML? XML vs RDF
 RDF based vocabularies, and the accompanying semantic
formalisms like RDFS or OWL, also make it easy to define
inference possibilities on RDF data.

31