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 (RDF).[2]
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."[2]
The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee,[3] 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.[4][failed verification]
History
The concept of the Semantic Network Model was coined in the early sixties by the cognitive scientist Allan M. Collins, linguist M. Ross Quillian and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus in various publications,[5][6][7][8][8] 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 driving 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.
Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the Semantic Web as follows:[10]
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] 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 for ages will finally materialize.
The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems. It has applications in publishing, blogging, and many other areas.
Often the terms "semantics", "metadata", "ontologies" and "Semantic Web" are used inconsistently. In particular, these terms are used as everyday terminology by researchers and practitioners, spanning a vast landscape of different fields, technologies, concepts and application areas. Furthermore, there is confusion with regard to the current status of the enabling technologies envisioned to realize the Semantic Web. In a paper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van der Merwe[11] the Semantic Web landscape is charted and a brief summary of related terms and enabling technologies is presented. The architectural model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee is used as basis to present a status model that reflects current and emerging technologies.[12]
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, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which 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. Metadata tags provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages, for example:
<metaname="keywords"content="computing, computer studies, computer"><metaname="description"content="Cheap widgets for sale"><metaname="author"content="John Doe">
With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as "this document's title is 'Widget Superstore'", but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text "X586172" is something that should be positioned near "Acme Gizmo" and "€199", etc. There is no way to say "this is a catalog" or even to establish that "Acme Gizmo" is a kind of title or that "€199" is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.
Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting "emphasis" rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.
Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.
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,[13] 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.
An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:
<item>cat</item>
Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:
Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web. Berners-Lee posits that if the past was document sharing, the future is data sharing. His answer to the question of "how" provides three points of instruction. One, a URL should point to the data. Two, anyone accessing the URL should get data back. Three, relationships in the data should point to additional URLs with data.
Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0'.[14]
People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've 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, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource..."
When we talk about the Semantic Web, we speak about many "howto’s" which are often incomprehensible because the required notions of linguistics are very often ignored by most people.
Thus, we rather imagine how emergence of the Semantic Web looks in the future.
Meta-Wiki
The sites of Wiki type soar. Their administrations and their objectives can be very different. These wikis are more and more specialized.
But most of wikis limit the search engines to index them because these search engines decrease the wikis' efficiency and record pages which are obsolete, by definition, outside the wiki (perpetual update).
Meta- search-engines are going to aggregate the obtained result by requesting individually at each of these wikis. The wikis become silos of available data for consultation by people and machines through access points (triplestore).
Semantic detectives & Semantic identity
The young bloggers are now on the labour 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).
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.
Profile Privacy/Consumer/Public
The Web's children became parents. They use tools which can limit the access and the spreading of the information by their children. So, the parents can see at any time the web's logs of their children but they also have a net which is going to filter their "private" identity before it is broadcasted on the network.
For example, a third-part trust entity, along with their mobile telephone provider, the post office and the bank, will possess the consumer’s identity so as to mask the address of delivery and the payment of this consumer.
A public identity also exists to spread a resume (CV), a blog or an avatar for example but the data remain the property of the owner of the server who hosts this data. So, the mobile telephone provider offers a personal server who will contain one public zone who will automatically be copied on the network after every modification. If I want that my resume is not any longer on the network, I just have to erase it of my public zone from my server. So, the mobile telephone provider creates a controllable silo of information for every public profile.
Personal agent
In a few years, the last generation of robot is now mobile and transcribes the human voice. However, it has to transfer the semantic interpretation to more powerful computers. These servers can so interpret the sense of simple sentences and interrogate other servers to calculate the answer to be given. Example:
"Arthur returned at him. He ordered a pizza by his personal digital agent. His agent is going to send the information to the home server which will accept or not the purchase. It refuses because it received the order of the Arthur's parents to buy only a well-balanced menu. So, the home server displays on the TV3D the authorized menus to allow Arthur to choose a new meal."
Research assistant
In 20??, the Semantic Web is now a reality.
Marc is a researcher. He has a new idea. He is going to clarify it with his digital assistant which is immediately going to show him the incoherence of his demonstration by using the accessible knowledge in silos on the Web. Marc will be able to modify his reasoning or to find the proofs which demonstrate that the existing knowledge is false and so to advance the scientific knowledge within the Semantic Web.
Challenges
Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency, and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web.
Vastness: The World Wide Web contains many billions of pages. The SNOMED CT medical terminology ontology alone contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs.
Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness.
Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.
Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because "anything follows from a contradiction". Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed to deal with inconsistency.
Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat.
This list of challenges is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to the "unifying logic" and "proof" layers of the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web (URW3-XG) final report lumps these problems together under the single heading of "uncertainty". Many of the techniques mentioned here will require extensions to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example to annotate conditional probabilities. This is an area of active research.[15]
Standards
Standardization for Semantic Web in the context of Web 3.0 is under the care of W3C.[16]
Components
The term "Semantic Web" is often used more specifically to refer to the formats and technologies that enable it.[2] The collection, structuring and recovery of linked data are enabled by technologies that provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain. These technologies are specified as W3C standards and include:
The Semantic Web Stack illustrates the architecture of the Semantic Web. The functions and relationships of the components can be summarized as follows:[17]
XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within. XML is not at present a necessary component of Semantic Web technologies in most cases, as alternative syntaxes exists, such as Turtle. Turtle is a de facto standard, but has not been through a formal standardization process.
XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects ("resources") and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in a variety of syntaxes, e.g., RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, and RDFa.[18] RDF is a fundamental standard of the Semantic Web.[19][20][21]
RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.
Unifying Logic and Proof layers are undergoing active research.
The intent is to enhance the usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources through:
Servers which expose existing data systems using the RDF and SPARQL standards. Many converters to RDF exist from different applications. Relational databases are an important source. The semantic web server attaches to the existing system without affecting its operation.
Documents "marked up" with semantic information (an extension of the HTML <meta>tags used in today's Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-understandable information about the human-understandable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about animals, people, places, ideas, etc.) Semantic markup is often generated automatically, rather than manually.
Common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of 'the Author of the page' won't be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject of a book review).
Automated agents to perform tasks for users of the semantic web using this data
Web-based services (often with agents of their own) to supply information specifically to agents (for example, a Trust service that an agent could ask if some online store has a history of poor service or spamming)
Skeptical reactions
Practical feasibility
Critics (e.g. Which Semantic Web?) question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the semantic web. Cory Doctorow's critique ("metacrap") is from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences. For example, people may include spurious metadata into Web pages in an attempt to mislead Semantic Web engines that naively assume the metadata's veracity. This phenomenon was well-known with metatags that fooled the AltaVista ranking algorithm into elevating the ranking of certain Web pages: the Google indexing engine specifically looks for such attempts at manipulation. Peter Gärdenfors and Timo Honkela point out that logic-based semantic web technologies cover only a fraction of the relevant phenomena related to semantics.[22][23]
Where semantic web technologies have found a greater degree of practical adoption, it has tended to be among core specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects.[24] The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.[24]
Potential of an idea in fast progress
The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web.[25] A complete evolution as described by Berners-Lee has yet to occur. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized."[26] While the idea is still in the making, it seems to evolve quickly and inspire many.[citation needed] Between 2007–2010 several scholars have explored the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking.[27] They have also explored the broader evolution of democracy: how a society forms its common will in a democratic manner through a semantic web.[28]
Censorship and privacy
Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding censorship and privacy. For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog. Some of these concerns were addressed in the "Policy Aware Web" project[29] and is an active research and development topic.
Doubling output formats
Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism. Another argument in defense of the feasibility of semantic web is the likely falling price of human intelligence tasks in digital labor markets, such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.
This section lists some of the many projects and tools that exist to create Semantic Web solutions.[30]
DBpedia
DBpedia is an effort to publish structured data extracted from Wikipedia: the data is published in RDF and made available on the Web for use under the GNU Free Documentation License, thus allowing Semantic Web agents to provide inferencing and advanced querying over the Wikipedia-derived dataset and facilitating interlinking, re-use and extension in other data-sources.
FOAF
A popular vocabulary on the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which uses RDF to describe the relationships people have to other people and the "things" around them. FOAF permits intelligent agents to make sense of the thousands of connections people have with each other, their jobs and the items important to their lives; connections that may or may not be enumerated in searches using traditional web search engines. Because the connections are so vast in number, human interpretation of the information may not be the best way of analyzing them.
FOAF is an example of how the Semantic Web attempts to make use of the relationships within a social context.
SIOC
The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project (SIOC, pronounced "shock") provides a vocabulary of terms and relationships that model web data spaces. Examples of such data spaces include, among others: discussion forums, blogs, blogrolls / feed subscriptions, mailing lists, shared bookmarks and image galleries.
NextBio
A database consolidating high-throughput life sciences experimental data tagged and connected via biomedical ontologies. Nextbio is accessible via a search engine interface. Researchers can contribute their findings for incorporation to the database. The database currently supports gene or protein expression data and sequence centric data and is steadily expanding to support other biological data types.
^Berners-Lee, Tim (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American Magazine. Retrieved March 26, 2008. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Klyne, Graham (February 26, 2004). "Semantic Web Applications"(PDF). Nine by Nine. Retrieved November 26, 2011.
^ Allan M. Collins, A (1969). "Retrieval time from semantic memory". Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior. 8 (2): 240–247. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(69)80069-1. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Allan M. Collins, A (1970). "Does category size affect categorization time?". Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior. 9 (4): 432–438. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(70)80084-6. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ Allan M. Collins, Allan M. (1975). "A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing". Psychological Review. 82 (6): 407–428. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.82.6.407. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ ab Quillian, MR (1967). "Word concepts. A theory and simulation of some basic semantic capabilities". Behavioral Science. 12 (5): 410–430. doi:10.1002/bs.3830120511. PMID6059773. Cite error: The named reference "M. Ross Quillian" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^Berners-Lee, Tim (May 17, 2001). "The Semantic Web". Scientific American Magazine. Retrieved March 26, 2008. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^Gerber, AJ, Barnard, A & Van der Merwe, Alta (2006), A Semantic Web Status Model, Integrated Design & Process Technology, Special Issue: IDPT 2006
^Gerber, Aurona; Van der Merwe, Alta; Barnard, Andries; (2008), A Functional Semantic Web architecture, European Semantic Web Conference 2008, ESWC’08, Tenerife, June 2008.
^Artem Chebotko and Shiyong Lu, "Querying the Semantic Web: An Efficient Approach Using Relational Databases", LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, ISBN 978-3-8383-0264-5, 2009.
^Victoria Shannon (June 26, 2006). "A 'more revolutionary' Web". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved May 24, 2006.
^Allemang, D., Hendler, J. (2011). "RDF—The basis of the Semantic Web. In: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist (2nd Ed.)". Morgan Kaufmann. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-385965-5.10003-2. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Gärdenfors, Peter (2004). How to make the Semantic Web more semantic. IOS Press. pp. 17–34. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
^See, for instance: Bergman, Michael K. "Sweet Tools". AI3; Adaptive Information, Adaptive Innovation, Adaptive Infrastructure. Retrieved January 5, 2009.
Roger Chaffin: The concept of a semantic Relation. In: Adrienne Lehrer u. a. (Hrsg.): Frames, Fields and contrasts. New essays in semantic and lexical organisation, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, N.J. 1992, ISBN 0-8058-1089-7, S. 253–288.
Hermann Helbig: Die semantische Struktur natürlicher Sprache. Wissenspräsentation mit MultiNet, Springer, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-540-67784-4.
M. Ross Quillian: Word concepts. A theory and simulation of some basic semantic capabilities. In: Behavioral Science 12 (1967), S. 410–430.
M. Ross Quillian: Semantic memory. In: Marvin Minsky (Hrsg.): Semantic information processing, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1988.
Klaus Reichenberger: Kompendium semantische Netze: Konzepte, Technologie, Modellierung, Springer, Heidelberg 2010, ISBN 3-642-04314-3.
John F. Sowa: Principles of semantic networks. Explorations in the representation of knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, Cal. 1991, ISBN 1-55860-088-4.