The Development of Business Applications Semantic Technology - Research Paper Example

Introduction to Semantic Web Semantic web can be defined as an intelligent and efficient way of data presentation. The data is retrieved from a globally shared database. The Semantic web is the extension of the World Wide Web. It has been integrated via the previous web technology The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML and has described it as a component of Web 3.0 (Impetus, 2008). Tim Berners-Lee has described Web 3.0 as, “People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when youve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, youll have access to an unbelievable data resource." (Wikipedia, 2009) World Wide Web consortiumW3C is working on this technology to make it more efficient, extendable and presentable to the users. Semantic Web enables the user to find, share and combine information on the web. It is based on machine readable information and uses XML technology to define customized tagging. It provides the common language to represent how the data is related to real world objects. The central idea is to provide the specific user requirements from the web. It is not a communication between web pages, but it describes relationships between objects. A software database technology includes some aspects through which semantic web works. Data which is transferred by human intervention or by machine is portably collected in a data space. Data spaces are domain specific. They are identified by an identifier. The data which can be viewed in object oriented view is called a data space. Linked data is a part of the Semantic web which is identified by URI (Uniform resource identifier). The Data or object existed in the data space must be movable and can be identified and cited by the uniform resource identifier whenever required. Open linked database, which is called as “ODS” is a distributed, collaborative web application platform, social network and content management system. It has been written using VSP, VSPX and the open link AJAX toolkit. It incorporates wide range of industry standards for data access and management (Wikipedia, 2009). Some of the technologies which semantic web uses for database functionality currently are: RDF: Resource Distribution Framework, RDF, is used implementing modeling concepts in web resources. The RDF uses several syntaxes for coding purpose. The RDF is similar to the conceptual approach which is used in software engineering. For example Class diagrams and Entity relationship diagrams. OWL: Web Ontology Language, OWL, is compatible with RDF schema. The OWL is basically used for the representation of information or knowledge and is approved by the World Wide Web consortium. XML: Extensible markup language, XML, also plays its role in semantic web database technologies. It defines the set of rules for sending the data electronically. XML is known for its simplicity and usability over the internet. Various application programming interfaces have been developed for using XML. SPARQL: One more query language which is used more commonly for the development of semantic web databases is SPARQL. It can manipulate and retrieve data objects which are stored in RDF format. The way SPARQL is used nowadays; it can be called a de facto query language. There are various technologies inventing today. Organizations continue to improve, communication among their customers, offices, and branches in a more efficient way. Communications are also becoming advance day by day by enabling GPS, Video conferencing on cell phones, PDA’s etc. As we can see the transportation of data has increased day by day and will continue its same rapid approach. This is the most critical aspect which semantic web has to overcome. Since the web 2.0 technologies has been already implemented and Web 3.0 we will use in near future has enabled us to view the contextual contents on the WWW (Mishra, 2007). Expectations from the Semantic web are very high. The information will be overloaded due to large amount of usage. Semantic web will increase its usability and extract usage to provide the web services to the users. Semantic web continues to provide fruitful solution in every aspect of modern science. E-science is one of the emerging technologies which are based on semantic web. We cannot predict exactly the industry requirements as technology is evolving and, who knows? What is coming next! E- Science is the use of electronic resources by using sensors, databases, computational methods, computers on which scientist working in a collaborative manner for a huge project distributed and categorized in different project teams to solve scientific problems. This approach requires access to very large data collections and scale computing with high performance visualization. The data requirement will increase as this technology on the web increases. As huge volume and multiplicity of data needs to be stored, database has to be efficient enough for recognizing different patterns of data from various web sources in an unpredictable way. New methods are needed for data archiving, data mining, data manipulation and sharing information originates from numerous sources. Knowledge is always important in every aspect of life. Knowledge management is the feature which is identified as strategically important for any organization (Euzenat, 2001). Semantic database supports storing, loading and DML operations on RDF / OWL models. Each model comprises of the set of a subject, objects, relationship triples organized as an RDF / OWL table. Advantages might be a normalized architecture manages the complexity originated by repeated usage of long URI’s, and objects, this lead to space efficient storage, scalable, per formant loading and querying RFD / OWL data. Native interference engine is an application which can manipulate or edit the data by defining set of terms and the relationship between them. Ontologies are used to build for utilizing domain specific knowledge. Ontologies data items consist of millions of data items and relationships. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila shared their views as advantages of Ontologies enable improved query analysis and actions based on semantic content rather than simply data values. Semantic database features include a native interference engine to provide well-organized and scalable inference by using OWL semantics. The OWL inference makes user defined rules for RDF and RDFS (2001). Industry giant Oracle is working with leading-edge customers and partners to ensure that Oracle Database 11g can serve as a foundation for a new generation of enterprise-class semantically-enabled business applications. The experience in the following domains is the key in helping to advance this technology. Web Metadata: Providing information about Web resources and systems that use them (content rating, capabilities, privacy) Life Sciences Applications: Query knowledge bases that can vary from simple taxonomies to full fledged Ontologies Social Network Applications: Friend of a Friend applications, social network tracking and navigation common in security and intelligence applications Semantic Information Integration: Defines shared, central business information model (ontology) to support information sharing across applications Semantic Web: Enables automated processing of Web information by software agents Portals and e-Marketplace Applications: Ability to query large amounts of metadata RDF data model by Oracle Spatial 10g Release 2 introduced the industrys first open, scalable, secure and reliable data management platform for RDF-based applications. New object types manage RDF data in Oracle. Based on a graph data model, RDF triples are persisted, indexed and queried, similar to other object-relational data types. Todays Oracle 11g RDF database ensures that application developers benefit from the scalability of the Oracle database to deploy scalable semantic-based enterprise applications. XML serves as a syntactic foundation layer for semantic technologies. Semantic technologies like RDF and OWL are built upon XML to guarantee a base level of interoperability (Oracle, 2009). Personal views for Semantic Web database advances Semantic web applications stores data on a centralized point which lowers ownership cost. The OWL model can be integrated with DBMS with the existing organizational data resulting in scalable and high performance of the application. It can be implemented on UNIX, Linux and windows platform which can be operated by existing IT resources. There is no limit of accessing the semantic databases and mission critical applications from the web, enabling unlimited users to access the data 27x 7x365. There are many websites which provide information regarding software, Weather conditions, Sports, but all in HTML. User has to visit the web page in order to gain access. Semantic web retrieve and present the relevant information as per user requirement from thousand of web pages, providing multiple choices to select. RSS is a very popular future based on semantic web technology which retrieves specific data as per user requirements. In my opinion semantic web is the perfect utilization and representation of data on the web (Orcacle, 2009). Current uses of Semantic Web Equipment prices from different vendors Information regarding different medicines Flight ticketing and schedules Information regarding books, research papers, editors, year) Computer application software updates RSS for news updates Semantic Web provides suggestions for buying a product online. It uses NLP (Natural Language processing) for analyzing what blogs are saying for a particular product on the web. In this way, even a most confused buyer can decide easily as the negative and positive suggestions about the product. Semantic technology in aerospace will be beneficial for the operational and the engineering staff for retrieval of sharp notification information, decision support and solar science. For the development of business applications semantic technology and Ontologies in exacting help domain experts and other non-IT users perform this role by lowering the obstacle for direct involvement in the development and evolution of not only semantic models of the data for their application domains, but also the models that administrate the application user interface and interactions, process execution, workflow, and domination. Features which semantic web provide for building dynamic business applications are: Global identifiers for everything Models for creating explicit relationships between data Ability to express the ‘meaning of data’ at run-time Direct means to connect, merge and layer data without special programming Ability to share the meaning of data on the web or intranet (Coyne, 2009). There are some factors which need to be improved as it is difficult at this stage to predict the disadvantages because semantic is not globally implemented to its full potential. Semantic web is the evolving development on the World Wide Web, There are billions of pages on the web, and semantic web has not fully overcome the web to provide its services. User may edit or change the content of the website by fake authors and resulting in duplication in the databases. There should be some mechanism to filter and detect these activities. RDF stores data slowly in vertical partitioned tables. Industrial KM applications have to avoid any kind of overhead as far as possible. Therefore, a seamless integration of knowledge creation, e.g. content and metadata specification, and knowledge access, e.g. querying or browsing, into the working environment is required. Strategies and methods are needed that support the creation of knowledge as side effects of activities that are carried out anyway. This requires means for emergent semantics, e.g. through ontology learning, which reduces the overhead of building-up and maintaining Ontologies (Jérôme, 2009) If anyone wants to start contributing to semantic web, he or she needs to: Publish globally any valuable data in RDF. Write an inference engine in the language of own choice. Spread the word: do some education and outreach. Help in the development of RDF Schema Contribute in representing state in RDF Apply your own development backgrounds to the Semantic Web Instead of using some proprietary system for any project or course work, think about making it a Semantic Web project instead. REFERENCES An Oracle White Paper. (2009). Oracle Database 11g Semantic Technologies Semantic Data Integration for the Enterprise. Available: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_technologies/pdf/semantic11g_dataint_twp.pdf. Last accessed 5 Dec 2009. Impetus Technologies, Inc. (2008). What is Web 3.0? Available: http://www.impetus.com/ilabs/whitepapers/Web3.pdf. Last accessed 6 Dec 2009. Jérôme Euzenat. (2001). Research challenges and perspectives of the Semantic Web. Available: http://www.ercim.org/EU-NSF/Semweb.pdf. Last accessed 5 Dec 2009. ORACLE. (2009). What Oracle Brings to Semantic Technologies?. Available: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/semantic_technologies/htdocs/what_oracle_brings.html. Last accessed 6 Dec 2009. Robert Coyne . (2009). Creating Dynamic Business Applications using Semantic Web Technology – Part II . Available: http://www.semanticuniverse.com/topquadrant-monthly-column/group-blog-entry-creating-dynamic-business-applications-using-semantic-w-0. Last accessed 6 Dec 2009. Samir Kumar Mishra . (2007). WWW - Past, Present and Future. Available: http://semanticdb.blogspot.com/2007/08/www-past-present-and-future.html. Last accessed 6 Dec 2009. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila,. (2001). Semantic Data Integration for the Enterprise - Oracle Semantic Technologies. Available: http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-data-integration-enterprise-oracle-semantic-technologies.html. Last accessed 5 Dec 2009. Wikipedia. (2009). OpenLink Data Spaces. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLink_Data_Spaces. Last accessed 5 Dec 2009. Wikipedia. (2009). Web 2.0. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0. Last accessed 6 Dec 2009. Read More