What Is The Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. • The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool. • John Lennon was a member of the Beatles. • “Hey Jude” was recorded by the Beatles. Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers? Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic? This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it. The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.
The main idea of Tim Berners-Lee was to build up a new machine readable Internet as an extension to the current textual Internet. Some of this data is representing knowledge models (“Ontologies”), which is represented using a W3C recommendation named “OWL”. SemTalk reads and writes OWL files. All knowledge which is available on the Semantic Web can be used for process models.
“The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where [as] the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.” – see http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.
The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database. The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web. What’s the rationale for such a system? Data that is geneally hidden away in HTML files is often useful in some contexts, but not in others. The problem with the majority of data on the Web
Many people are not clear as to what the Semantic web is, and as we are the Semantic Web Agreement Group, we need to define it for people. Therefore, here is an attempt at a clear view of the Semantic Web:- The Semantic Web is a Web that includes documents, or portions of documents, describing explicit relationships between things and containing semantic information intended for automated processing by our machines. It operates on the principle of shared data. When you define what a particular type of data is, you can link it to other bits of data and say “that’s the same”, or some other relation. For example, “zip” in my SW system is the same as “zip” in my friends. Although it gets more complicated than this, that is bascially what the SW is all about, sharing data through ontologies, and processing it logically. Trust is also important, as the trust of a certain source is fully in the hands of the user. This is a fully decentralized system: “you can’t make something be the center of
