The Difference that Makes the Difference in Business

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [1] that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a “web of data”. It builds on the W3C’s Resource Description Framework

According to the W3C, “The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries

] The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee

the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

He defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.” While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept.

History

The concept of the Semantic Network Model was coined in the early sixties by the cognitive scientist Allan M. Collins, linguist M. Ross Quilling and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus in various publications, as a form to represent semantically structured knowledge. It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling automated agents to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users.

The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, [9] the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards.

He defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.” Many of the technologies proposed by the W3C already existed before they were positioned under the W3C umbrella. These are used in various contexts, particularly those dealing with information that encompasses a limited and defined domain, and where sharing data is a common necessity, such as scientific research or data exchange among businesses. In addition, other technologies with similar goals have emerged, such as microformats.

Purpose

The main purpose of the Semantic Web is to drive the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share, and combine information more easily. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “folder”, reserving a library book, and searching for the lowest price for a DVD.

However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that can be readily interpreted by machines, so machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.

The Semantic Web, as originally envisioned, is a system that enables machines to “understand” and respond to complex human requests based on their meaning. Such an “understanding” requires that the relevant information sources is semantically structured, a challenging task.

Limitations of HTML

Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into human-readable documents and machine-readable data.

Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, address books, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program that lets them be viewed, searched, and combined in different ways.

Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms.

Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts.

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content.

In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research

Semantic detectives & Semantic identity

The young bloggers are now on the labor market. The companies do not ask any longer for the judicial file of a new employee. To have information, the companies appeal in a systematic way to engines which are going to interrogate all the sites which reference and index the accessible information on the Web.

The differentiation between search engines is going to concern the capacity to respond at requests where the sense is going to take more and more importance (evolution of the requests with keywords towards the semantic requests.

The infamous Jimmy John Shark picture has been making rounds on the internet for years now. People have been wondering whether the photo is real or fake.

Last Word

There will be three types of person: the unknown, the “without splash” and the others. The others will have to erase in a systematic way the information which could carry disadvantages and which will be more and more accessible. It will be the same engines of semantic search which also charge this service. Visit studycrumb.com for useful information