October 19, Semantic Web
October 19, Semantic Web Part 3: Semantic Web
October 19, Should you care? Did the World Wide Web affect you? Would you have wished you had more advanced warning, earlier implication of the change?
October 19, 20054
5 Look familiar?
October 19, WWW growth
October 19, The Semantic Web is Comparable Not a different web, but an extension of the current one. It is essentially the addition of meaningful tags to content on the web, such that software can help us find things.
October 19, Ill Wait Lead time Skills development Leadership
October 19, Naysayers Cory Doctorow: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia Russell Glass: Is Anyone Going to Tag all this Stuff? Clay Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview Peter Norvig, Google: Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't
October 19, Weve heard all this before In 1995 the idea that the local restaurants, the muffler shop or the bed and breakfast would have their own web site was laughable. –They would need people to program HTML –They would need servers, admins, etc.
October 19, Semantic Web is already here only 642,000 documents with.rdf extension & 9,000.owl Yet 20,000,000 rdf triples are accessible (DARPA) 5,000,000 FoaFnauts Oracle 10.2 Every Adobe document
October 19, Adobe 6.0 and up
October 19, So, what is the Semantic Web? How do we know what anything is? –By analogy –By difference –By decomposition and description of the parts –By subsumption & categorization –By definition
October 19, Analogy A giant disk drive (internet) A query engine for the internet Surfing the web
October 19, By Difference Sometimes we understand things by what they are different from.
October 19, Horseless carriage
October 19, Wireless telegraph
October 19, Paperless office
October 19, Paperless …
October 19, Human-less search interpretation
October 19, Decomposition and description of the parts Bicycle = frame + 2 wheels + gear train + brakes + seat + handle bars Semantic Web = shared ontologies + tagged content + inference engines + service composition
October 19, By subsumption and categorization A badger is a nocturnal [categorization] omnivore [prototypical] mammal [subsumption] The Semantic Web is a federated [prototypical] web [subsumption] with RDF tagged content [categorization]
October 19, By definition The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming.RDF W3C The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages and related processing tools.semanticsTim Berners-LeeWorld Wide Web ConsortiumWorld Wide Webmarkup languages Wikipedia
October 19, A closer look The power of the SW comes from a set of standards, each of which provides just a few capabilities. What follows is the essence of what is added at each level in the standards stack, starting with those we already know and love.
October 19, Semantic Web Official Stack
October 19, Essence at each level TCP/IPGlobal Physical Addressing DNS/URLGlobal Logical Addressing XMLUniversal Parsing XSDAllowable Structure RDFAssertions / Merging RDFSFrames / Classes OWLInference / Reasoning SWRLRule Execution March 2004
October 19, TCP / IP Single model for communication Globally unique physical addressing
October 19, DNS and URL Logical address need not = physical address Allows rehosting, migration, etc. DNS
October 19, XML Uniform parsing rules, tools, etc. Metadata (at least some of it) travels with the data. DaVinci Code Dan Brown DaVinci Code Dan Brown XML HTML/ XHTML
October 19, XSD Rules about allowable XML combinations Can verify XML validity Primarily for creating XML, not consuming it Comment describing your root element
October 19, RDF Resource Description Framework Subject/Predicate/Object Triple and Triple Store Make assertions Merge identities [proto truth]
October 19, Triples Subject Object Predicate A URI (URL) A URI (URL) or Literal Think instances Subject/Predicate/Object Dave McCombSem in Bus wrote
October 19, RDF Triples from a Database
October 19, RDF Triples from a Document Order2 for winterfest
October 19, Simple Merge
October 19, First Principles Two things Equal To the Same Thing Are Equal To Each other
October 19, MER1 & 2 and Spirit
October 19, Reification Each Assertion (statement) has its own URI and can therefore be the Object of another Assertion
October 19, Reification is Useful For Veracity Provenance Security
October 19, RDFS RDF Schema Meta Data for RDF Adds classes, properties, subclasses
October 19, RDFS adds Properties
October 19, RDFS Subtypes
October 19, OWL Web Ontology Language Comes in three flavors –OWL Lite –OWL DL (Description Logics) –OWL Full Adds Reasoning
October 19, OWL DL Necessary & sufficient
October 19, OWL DL
October 19, SWRL OWL + RuleML Adds more complex reasoning and the ability to execute action
October 19, SWRL If y is xs parent, and z is ys brother, then z is xs uncle. parent(?x,?y) ^ brother(?y,?z) ^ uncle(?x,?z)
October 19, Tools Part 4: Demos
October 19, Tool: Protege
October 19, Altova SemanticWorks
October 19, Tool: AeroText
October 19, Infrastructure
October 19, Infrastructure: Siderean
October 19, Unicorn
October 19, Semantic Web
October 19, Essence at each level TCP/IPGlobal Physical Addressing DNS/URLGlobal Logical Addressing XMLUniversal Parsing XSDAllowable Structure RDFAssertions / Merging RDFSFrames / Classes OWLInference / Reasoning SWRLRule Execution
October 19, Questions?
October 19, Re cap – Objective One: Theres much more to Semantics than good definitions
October 19, Objective Two – Did you learn a lot of exotic terminology? What is/are: –Semantics –Taxonomies and Ontologies –Inference –Description Logics –Classification and Reasoning –Semantic Web
October 19, Objective Three: to pursue further Send an to me at For either a glossary of semantic terms or the CIOs Guide to Semantics [I have a few bound copies] Visit our web site, many interesting free white papers Semantic Wiki
October 19, Resources – Books Semantics in Business Systems, print and audio Semantic Web Primer Grigoris Antoniou The Semantic Web Michael Daconta et al. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things George Lakoff
October 19, Semantic Technology Conference March 6-9, 2006 San Jose, CA
October 19, Getting Started Semantic Awareness Day Just Do It Examples Assessment / What do you want to solve Training Community of Practice
October 19, One last word
October 19, Semantic Arts, Inc.