REFERENCES
(1) Feigenbaum, Lee et al. “The Semantic Web in Action.” Scientific American December 2007: 90-97
(2) “Semantic Web” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 21 Apr 2008, 21:59 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 23 Apr 2008
(3) Sean B. Palmer “The Semantic Web in Action.”
There is yet another new movement underway to change the nature of the World Wide Web as we know it. In the early 2000s, the ideas of blogging, Wikis, and later, social-networking sites made the World Wide Web (just one type of the many forms of the Internet) more open to the masses of consumers and thus led an even greater surge of people to walk through the gates of tomorrow. Now, we are on the verge of making advancements in the services of the World Wide Web yet again. This new development in WWW technology is known as the Semantic Web, and it is an idea that was come up with by the creator of the original WWW, Tim Berners-Lee. In a quote from 1999, Berners-Lee stated that he had “a dream for the Web [in which computers] themselves 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, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted will finally materialize.” (2) And so, 8 years later, in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, it appears that Berners-Lee vision is starting to come of age.
According to the Scientific American article “the Semantic Web in Action,” the Semantic Web is, indeed, “a set of formats and languages that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web, allowing consumers and business to understand all kinds of useful online information.” Another way to think of it is to think of the Semantic Web as a means of allowing our computers themselves the ability to understand and interpret the information contained on the WWW so that the computer itself can help us organize our information and make it easier to understand. Among the things that allow the Semantic Web to work are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format for defining information on the Web, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), Inference Engines and other technologies such as the SPARQL and GRDDL languages (1). The RDF format works by grouping two pieces of data, and a link that connects the data together, into one unit called a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). The data and their link is called a triple, and an example would be “Spot is a Dog,” where “Spot” and “Dog” are the two pieces of data, and the link that connects them is the phrase “is a.” By doing this method of identifying resources online, people can organize their disparate sets of data about dogs named spot into one space, thus allowing for merging of knowledge bases on large scales. The Ontology Web Language (OWL) allows individuals or groups to define terms and data they frequently use that may have multiple meanings in one place using this standard that is compatible with the RDF. By doing this, we can be sure that terms that may have multiple meanings (and perhaps multiple pronunciations, like “bass” as in fish and “bass” as in guitar), are compatible with the RDF and are usable in the database. Finally, inference engines work a level above the ontologisms in the database in order to allow the URIs to make inferences based on the data they have in order to find new relations among terms and data in the URI. Finding relations between data is the first step towards being able to understand data much better, and thus accomplishing the goal of allowing the computers themselves to understand the data that is inputted into them. (1) For example, the inference engine allows the URI to have “Spot is a Dog” be connected to and become “Spot is a Mammal” based on the existing data of “Dog is a Subclass of Mammal,” where “subclass of” is the connecting link piece in the latter triple. With this software being the engine of the Semantic Web, the WWW can now use semantics to understand the content of all the information on the Internet, thus bringing us an even easier-to-use and more versatile service.
The Semantic Web is already seeing use in the healthcare and Drug Discovery industries as well as even on the consumer market. An example of the Semantic Web’s influence on the consumer market is in the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), a grassroots, decentralized social networking site that has grown through enthusiasts themselves creating a Semantic Web vocabulary for describing people’s names, ages, locations, jobs and relationships to one another in order to find common interests among one another. FOAF users can post imagery and information in any format and then seamlessly connect it all (1). In the Drug Discovery world, a research team at the Cincinnati Children’s
The Semantic Web, indeed, represents a remarkable step towards a smarter, easier-to-use and even more versatile Internet that can do everything from save lives by yielding advances in medicine through proper data management, to simply making consumers lives easier and more fun by allowing social networks to provide their members with even more clever toys with which to play. Indeed, as the web advances in leaps and bounds like this, we may soon see it becoming more like…. the “matrix….”
FURTHER
“W3C Semantic Web activity.”
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