Semantic web

Draft

Definition

• “The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web.” Wikipedia: Semantic Web

Technology

People who work on the Semantic Web base their work on the famous "semantic web tower". Its major components are:

• XML
• RDF
• OWL an W3C ontology standard built on top of RDF

A simplified picture of the Semantic web tower is:

The simplified semantic web tower

See also the RDF article, e.g. for information about the "RDF bus".

• Semantic web applications are usually built on top of RDF, e.g. see FOAF as a relatively simple example

Alternatively, there are initiatives outside the W3C RDF framework, like:

• Topic maps

The relation to Web 2.0

Web 2.0 does incorporate some "semantics" but globally speaking it is much inspired by making it as simple as possible. E.g.

• Simple RSS (0.91, 2.0) instead of RSS 1.0 that was based on RDF
• Folksonomies instead of formal taxnomies metadata based on RDF semantics
• People-driven aggregation of knowledge (e.g. via syndication of the blogsphere) instead of smarter search engines. An exception are some of the best citation indexes that use both approaches.

Some examples

• FOAF ("Friends of a friend") is an RDF-based social software for social networks.
• Semantic Media Wiki] (At some DSchneider will make a test with this within this wiki)

Links

• Semantic Web. W3C home page. (includes links to all standards, groups, and some publications).

• Dave Beckett's Resource Description Framework (RDF) Resource Guide. This is probably the most complete index of documents.

Short Tutorials etc.

• The Semantic Web Made Easy, W3C page, retrieved 16:05, 23 November 2006 (MET).

FAQs

• Semantic Web Road Map:

• hat the Semantic Web Can Represent FAQ

References

• Hendler, James, Berners-Lee, Tim and Miller, Eric "Integrating Applications on the Semantic Web," Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol 122(10), October, 2002, p. 676-680. HTML (Reprint).

• Horrocks, Ian; Bijan Parsia, Peter Patel-Schneider and James Hendler (2005). Semantic Web Architecture: Stack or Two Towers, in Francois Fages and Sylvain Soliman, editors, Principles and Practice of Semantic Web Reasoning (PPSWR 2005), number 3703 in LNCS, pages 37-41. SV, 2005. PDF Preprint

• Shadbolt, Nigel; Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall (2006).

The Semantic Web Revisited, by , IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(3) pp. 96-101, May/June 2006 PDF.