Why I Find The Semantic Web Interesting Hugh Glaser DSSE Seminar 1/11/2

Semantic Web Definition: The Semantic Web is the abstract representation of data on the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and other standards to be defined. It is being developed by the W3C, in collaboration with a large number of researchers and industrial partners. "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners- Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May

Semantic Web Architecture

Advanced Knowledge Technologies EPSRC-funded IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Centre) six years quite a bit of money Southampton lead, OU, Sheffield Edinburgh, Aberdeen Semantic Web v. Engineering Support

Some Specific Challenges Scale, scale and more scale Information Acquisition Co-Reference Analysis Component Definition & Architecture

Information Acquisition We need Metadata on documents One day it will be created at source Until then it needs to be extracted Natural Language Processing? To explore issues now, we need something now Using DOME and other techniques - orders of magnitude bigger than anything elsewww.hyphen.info

Co-Reference Analysis 1 Large scale means multiple resources How do we know that Hugh Glaser in the RAE data is Hugh Glaser in ECS and Hugh Glaser in Southampton, …? Even University of Southampton in the RAE data is the same as

Co-Reference Analysis 2 Some techniques –Gazetteer –COP (Community of Practice) –Fancy statistical methods How do they get used And cast as a service Then, how do we represent the knowledge? –(Is this the symbol grounding problem?)

Component Definition & Architecture Concept Diagram (text)Concept Diagram

Conclusions A world of problems on a grand scale Plenty of room for pragmatism & fun Need many specialists –NLP –AI –Stats –DB –Business Process Modelling –… –Computer Science And I didn’t mention the Grid or Agents!