Semantic Web

What is semantic web?

“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current
web in which information is given well-defined
meaning, better enabling computers and people to
work in co-operation.“
[Berners-Lee et al, 2001]
 Knowledge Representation
• For Semantic Web to function, the computers should have access to
• Structured Collections of Information
• Meaning of this Information
• Sets of Inference Rules/Logic.

These sets of Inference rules can be used to conduct automated reasoning.

• Technological Threads for developing the Semantic Web:

- XML
- RDF
- Ontologies
 Today’s Web
• Currently most of the Web content is suitable for human
use.
• Typical uses of the Web today are information seeking,
publishing, and using, searching for people and products,
shopping, reviewing catalogues, etc.
• Dynamic pages generated based on information from
databases but without original information structure found
in databases.
 Limitations of the Web Search today

• The Web search results are high recall, low precision.

• Results are highly sensitive to vocabulary.
• Results are single Web pages.
• Most of the publishing contents are not structured to allow
logical reasoning and query answering.
Today’s Web
 What is a Web of Data?

Thinking back a bit... 1994

HTML and URIs

Markup language and means for connecting

resources

Below the file level

Stopped at the text level

 What is a Web of Data?
(continued)
Now

XML, RDF, OWL and URIs

Markup language and means for connecting resources

Below the file level

Below the text level

At the data level

Semantic Web Vision
Machine-processable, global Web
standards:
 Assigning unambiguous names (URI)
 Expressing data, including metadata

(RDF)
 Capturing ontologies (OWL)
 Query, rules, transformations,

deployment, application spaces, logic,

proofs, trust (in progress)
 Semantic Web and AI?
• No human-level intelligence claims
• As with today’s WWW
• large, inconsistent, distributed
• Requirements
• scalable, robust, decentralised
• tolerant, mediated
• Semantic Web will make extensive use of current AI,
• any advancement in AI will lead to a better Semantic Web
• Current AI is already sufficient to go towards realizing the semantic web vision
• As with WWW, Semantic Web will (need to) adapt fast
 Semantic Web & Knowledge Management

• Organising knowledge in conceptual spaces according to

its meaning.
• Enabling automated tools to check for inconsistencies and
extracting new knowledge.
• Replacing query-based search with query answering.
• Defining who may view certain parts of information
Semantic Web Services
 Web Services

• Web Services provide data and services to other

applications.
• Thee applications access Web Services via standard Web
Formats (HTTP, HTML, XML, and SOAP), with no need
to know how the Web Service itself is implemented.
• You can imagine a web service like a remote procedure
call (RPC) which it returns a message in an XML format.
 Web Services

• loosely coupled, reusable components

• encapsulate discrete functionality
• distributed
• programmatically accessible over standard internet
protocols
• add new level of functionality on top of the current web
The Promise of Web Services
 Deficiencies of WS Technology
• Current technologies allow usage of Web Services
• but:
• only syntactical information descriptions
• syntactic support for discovery, composition and execution
=> Web Service usability, usage, and integration needs to be inspected manually
• no semantically marked up content / services
• no support for the Semantic Web

=> current Web Service Technology Stack failed to

realize the promise of Web Services
 Semantic Web Services
Semantic Web Technology
• allow machine supported data interpretation
• ontologies as data model

Web Service Technology

automated discovery, selection, composition,
and web-based execution of services

=> Semantic Web Services as integrated solution for realizing the vision of the next
generation of the Web
 Semantic Web Services
• define exhaustive description frameworks for describing Web
Services and related aspects (Web Service Description
Ontologies)
• support ontologies as underlying data model to allow machine
supported data interpretation (Semantic Web aspect)
• define semantically driven technologies for automation of the
Web Service usage process (Web Service aspect)
 Advantages

• Automated Tools

• Enhanced Web Services

• Effective Searching

• Quality issues

• Trust Issues
 Conclusion
• The semantic web in naming every concept simply by a URI, lets everyone
express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort.

• Its unifying modeling language will enable these concepts to be progressively

linked into a universal web.

• The structure of semantic web will open up the knowledge and workings of
human kind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class
of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.
Thank You