Does the Semantic Web require me to manually markup all the existing web-pages, or to convert all the data in relational databases into RDF?
The Semantic Web is about a web of data. The data itself can reside in databases, spreadsheets, Wiki pages, or indeed traditional web pages. The challenge is to develop tools that can “export” these data into RDF form: RDF plays the role of a common model, as a kind of a “glue” to integrate the data. That does not mean that the data must be physically converted into RDF form and stored in, say, RDF/XML. Instead, automatic procedures, for example SQL to RDF converters for relational databases, GRDDL processors for XHTML files with microformats, RDFa, etc, can produce RDF data on-the-fly as an answer to, eg, queries. RDF data may also be included in the data via other tools (e.g, Adobe’s XMP data that gets automatically added to JPEG images by Photoshop). Authoring tools also exist to develop, eg, ontologies on a high level instead of editing the ontology files directly. Of course, direct editing of RDF data is sometimes necessary, but it can be expected to become less and less prevalent
The Semantic Web is about a web of data. The data itself can reside in databases, spreadsheets, Wiki pages, or indeed traditional web pages. The challenge is to develop tools that can “export” these data into RDF form: RDF plays the role of a common model, as a kind of a “glue” to integrate the data. That does not mean that the data must be physically converted into RDF form and stored in, say, RDF/XML. Instead, automatic procedures, for example SQL to RDF converters for relational databases, GRDDL processors for XHTML files with microformats, RDFa, etc, can produce RDF data on-the-fly as an answer to, eg, queries. RDF data may also be included in the data via other tools (e.g, Adobe’s XMP data that gets automatically added to JPEG images by Photoshop). Authoring tools also exist to develop, eg, ontologies on a high level instead of editing the ontology files directly. Of course, direct editing of RDF data is sometimes necessary, but it can be expected to become less and less prevalent
Related Questions
- Does the Semantic Web require me to manually markup all the existing web-pages, or to convert all the data in relational databases into RDF?
- I am using another software package, but I would like to switch to BlueSmart. Can you convert my existing data to BlueSmart?
- What are some other ways of embedding semantic data in web pages?
