Semantic Web System - Case Study Example

The Semantic Web An evolving development of the World Wide Web is the Semantic web in which the information and its meaning and services on the web is defined, which satisfies the request of machines and people and makes it possible in turn for the web to “understand” and abide by the demands of the people and machines and helps them use the web content. It has been derived from the vision of the director of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners- Lee of the Web as universal medium for the exchange of knowledge, information and data. “The vision of semantic Web services is to describe the various aspects of a Web service using explicit, machine-understandable semantics, enabling the automatic location, combination, and use of Web services” (Perez and Euzenat, 2005, p. 1). The semantic web at its core includes a set of collaborative working groups, design principles, and a verity of facilitative technologies. A few parts of the semantic web are projected as potential future possibilities that have not yet been put into practice or executed. The formal elements of semantic web include notations like RDF Schema, the Web Ontology Language, Resource Description Framework, a variety of data interchange formats like N3, N-Triples, Turtle, RDF/XML, which intend on providing a prescribed description of terms, relationships and concepts within the knowledge domain given. Man has the capability of using the Web to carry out his day to day chores; one may use the web to find the meanings of words, to reserve a movie ticket, to book a flight, to find information about something, etc. Anyhow the information available on the web is designed in such a manner that it can be read only by the people and not by the computers so the computer is unable to carry out such tasks without being directed by man. The vision of information which is understood by computers and enables them to perform of work which is tedious which involves combining, sharing and finding information on the web is enabled by semantic web. Semantic Web will be beneficial to semantic publishing in a great manner, it is expected that Semantic Web will bring revolution to scientific publishing like sharing of experimental data on the Internet and real – time publishing. W3C HCLS group’s Scientific Publishing Task Force is now exploring this essential idea. Due to the fast growth in the usage of Web, with the renovation and innovation of information content technologies, Semantic Web application areas are experiencing an increased interest. The Semantic Web provides a means for the realization of Enterprise Information Systems and is regarded as an integrator across different content and information systems and applications. The increased rate of growth provides a drive to the researchers to focus on the dissemination and creation of pioneering Semantic Web technology, where the imaginary ‘Semantic Web’ is long overdue. The terms ‘ ontologies’, ‘metadata’, ‘Semantics’ and ‘Semantic Web’ are usually used erratically, however in general these are the terms that are used as day to day terminology by practitioners and researchers, spanning an enormous scene of various fields, concepts, technologies and application areas. “Ontology-based human communication aims at reducing and eliminating terminological and conceptual confusion by defining a shared understanding, that is, a unifying framework enabling communication and cooperation amongst people in reaching better inter-enterprise organization” (Cardoso et all, 2008, p.5). Additionally there is uncertainty in regards with the present condition of facilitating technologies that are envisioned to realize Semantic Web. The Semantic Web landscape has been charted and a short summary of enabling technologies and related terms has been presented by Van der Merwe, Barnard and Gerber in their paper. To present a status model that shows the present and upcoming technologies, the architectural model suggested by Tim Berners-Lee is used as a basis. The files in a usual computer can be classified into two parts data and documents. Documents are for example email messages, brochures, reports and the like that are read by the human beings, and data is playlists, address books, spreadsheets and the like that require an application program through which it can be viewed, combined and searched in a lot of methods. At present Hypertext Markup Language is used to write the documents on which the World Wide Web is mainly based. A body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms are coded using this markup convention. With the use of HTML and a tool like web browser software that can render it one can make a page and list items for sale on it. The traditional method of HTML which is specifying the intention instead of the layouts details directly is called Semantic HTML. For example, the use of indicating ‘emphasis’ instead of , which denotes italics. The browser combined with Cascading Style Sheets takes care of the layout details. However, this procedure is short of stating the semantics of objects like pirces or items for sale. An unofficial attempt was made with Microfromats to extend HTML and create semantic markup that was machine-readable for object like items for sale and retail stores. The solution is taken a step further by the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web publishes in languages that are particularly made for data, for example, Web Ontology Language (OWL), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Resource Description Framework (RDF). The role HTML plays is that of describing documents and the links between these documents. Whereas, OWL, XML, and RDF, on the other hand, have the capability of describing random objects such as people, meetings, or even parts of an aircraft. “The use of XML in not mandatory, however, we concentrate on this language with regards to the Internet” (Visser, 2004, p. 97). According to Tim Berner-Lee the resulting network of this Linked Data is the Giant Global Graph, which is in contrast to the World Wide Web which is HTML based. These different technologies have been brought together so that they can provide descriptions that replace or enhance the content present in web documents. Hence, content may patent itself as data that is descriptive and is stored in databases that are Web-accessible. This content is also stored as markup within the documents itself mixed with XML, or more frequently, only in XML, with rendering cues or layouts. “Since XML separates content from presentation rules, any appropriate language and technology can be used for displaying the content of an XML document in a visually rich form” (Geroimenko and Chen, 2002, p. 90). Content managers are able to add meaning to the content with the help of machine-readable description, that is, to illustrate the organization of knowledge we have about the content we see. With this technology, a machine has the capability of processing knowledge, rather than text, with the help of processes similar to human inference and deductive reasoning, in doing so machine obtain meaningful results. This helps computers execute automated gathering of information and research as well. The Semantic Web shares a number of similarities with OOP or Object-Oriented Programming. Both object-oriented programming and the semantic web have the concept of objects of instances and they also have classes with attributes. OOP uses the programming concept of ‘object identifiers’ or ‘pointers’ in a manner similar to the Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers used in Linked Data. Hence, Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers can be used to access data by reference. The Unified Modeling Language which is designed to communicate on object-oriented systems can therefore be used for semantic web development and object-oriented programming. The web was first created using object-oriented programming, with the help of languages like CORBA, Smalltalk, and Objective-C, in the late 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. The Enterprise Objects Framework, WebObjects, and Portable Distributed Objects which were released by NeXT was announced in the mid 1990s which furthered the development of the web. At the same time Microsoft announced the release of Component Object Model. Later, XML was released in the year 1998, which was followed by the release of RDF in the year 1999. “The RDF specification was designed from the ground up as a language for representing metadata about resources on the Web” (Kashyap et all, 2008, p.36). Two other programs showed similarity to object-oriented programming, the first of which was the development of ‘Hyperdocument’ sysmens which were very knowledge centric, these were designed by Douglas Engelbart. The second was the creation and use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The practicality of a complete or even a partial accomplishment of the semantic web has always been questioned by critics. Cory Doctorow relates human behavior and personal preferences in his critique. For example, people can include bogus metadata into web pages in an effort to misinform the semantic web engines that unpretentiously presume the metadata’s authenticity. This trend was seen when well-known metatags had fooled Alta Vista’s ranking algorithm to bring certain websites above the others. The search engine Google constantly keeps an eye open for such attempts at manipulating the system. “Maintaining appropriate metadata is critical for intelligent browsing” (Thuraisingham, 2002, p. 111). It is believed that logic based technologies of the semantic web can only cover a small fraction of appropriate phenomena with regards to semantics. Semantic web technologies have found a great amount of adaptation practically, however this adoption has been mainly in the hands of organizations for the use of intra company projects and by specialized communities. The realistic limitations toward implementation have appeared less testing where domain and scale is more restricted than that of the World Wide Web and the general public. The semantic web faces many challenges, some of which are, vagueness, vastness, deceit, inconsistency, and uncertainty. The automated reasoning systems will have to face all these challenges and many more in order to make the semantic web a success. These problems have been grouped together under a single title called ‘uncertainty’ in the final report of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web (URW3-XG). “In the WWW area, standards are set by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium); they are called recommendations, in acknowledgement of the fact that distributed environment without central authority, standards cannot be enforced” (Antoniou and Harmelen, 2004, p. 23). Many techniques mentioned in the report require extensions to OWL or Web Ontology Language, one such example is to comment on conditional probabilities. This area of research is still active. “In the vision of the “Semantic Web”, computers will be able to use data on the web not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications” (Handschuh and Staab, 2003, p. 79). The semantic web consist taxonomies, ontologies, resource standards, and metadata. However, the future of the web is to move to the physical from the digital world. The semantic web offers the technology required for this shift. RFID or Radio-Frequency Identification is the key element, if people want to connect all things on the World Wide Web. Reference List -Antoniou, Grigoris and Harmelen, Frank Van. 2004. A Semantic Web Primer. USA: MIT Press. -Gómez-Pérez, Asunción and Euzenat, Jérôme. 2005. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. Germany: Springer. -Cardoso , Jorge, Hepp , Martin, and Lytras Miltiadis D. 2008. The Semantic Web: Real-World Application from Industry. USA: Springer. -Geroimenko , Vladimir, and Chen, Chaomei. 2002. Visualizing the Semantic Web: XML-based Internet and Information Visualization. Great Britain: Springer. -Kashyap, Vipul, Bussler, Christoph, and Moran, Matthew. The Semantic Web: Semantics for Data and Services on the Web. Germany: Springer. -Handschuh , Siegfried, and Staab, Steffen. 2003. Annotation for the Semantic Web. Netherlands: IOS Press. -Thuraisingham, Bhavani M. 2002. XML Databases and the Semantic Web. USA: CRC Press. -Visser, Ubbo. 2004. Intelligent Information Integration for the Semantic Web. Germany: Springer Read More