Semantic web

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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:

A simplified picture of the Semantic web tower is:

The simplified semantic web tower


  • Semantic web applications built on top of RDF, e.g. FOAF

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

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

Links

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

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.