The Semantic Web Prof. Enrico Motta Knowledge Media Institute The Open University

The World-Wide-Web Huge information space and computing infrastructure All the world knowledge and a huge number of services at your fingertips Easy to publish information/services Reasonable easy to locate resources (for humans - it is hard for machines)

The WWW Revolution Combination of ease of publishing, hugeness and removal of physical barriers implies revolutionary, disruptive, society-changing technology Examples –Napster –Baghdad blogger beats BBC, CNN, etc… –Old lady in Yorkshire sets up very successful business from isolated cottage… –17-year old kids become millionaires…etc, etc

So what next for the web?… Current web primarily for human consumption –Hard to locate resources for machines –Hard to locate info across web pages (for both humans and machines) –published information not easily processable by machines –Limited possibilities for large- scale interoperability and the provision of ‘smart’ functionalities

In a nutshell… There is so much information out there, but current technology can do very little with it And of course in the knowledge economy, access to the right information at the right time is a key competitive advantage

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KMi Semantic Web

Peter- Scott Head of CNM / Senior Lecturer Peter Scott news.kmi.open.ac.uk/pete rblog

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The Semantic Web Huge, distributed markup Statements about web resources and entities in the world Formal, declarative, machine processable information Markup based on shared ontologies, to enable interoperability between agents (both human and software)

So What? Semantic Markup supports semantic search, based on meaning rather than keyword retrieval Shared ontologies allow ‘conceptual interoperability’ Conceptual interoperability enables the discovery, aggregation and use of information coming from multiple sites Key is the use of formal, explicit, declarative, shared representations

Trends and Possibilities…. Semantic web is not a fad…here to stay –Some visionary papers may seem a bit over the top but reality is that Semantic web is growing more quickly than the web Huge amounts of distributed semantic markup will become available within 3-5 years WWW has opened up huge new markets and removed geographical and marketing barriers Semantic web will be about automating processes and achieving novel smart functionalities by leveraging machine- processable contents

Example: Travel Industry Now: Expedia’s strategy is based on providing holiday packages customizations at no extra cost Future: Automatic travel agents interoperating in real time with huge numbers of heterogenous providers to provide custom- tailored travel packages

Example: Financial Sector Now: Portfolio creation, management and customization slow and expensive Future: Smart artificial brokers will outperform human brokers by being able to make use of large amounts of real-time data about financial products, environments and clients, to provide optimized, tailor-made financial portfolio for clients

Example: Music Industry Now: Digital music, ‘smart’ playlists, podcasting… Future: All music ever created available online and massively marked-up. Huge possibilities for intelligently customized radio stations, for automated clearance of copyrights, etc, etc..

Conclusions The semantic web is about producing massive amounts of distributed semantic annotations - making explicit and formal what is implicit and informal The availability of large scale semantic markup opens up the way for –Intelligent aggregation of information –Smart search engines able to reason about information coming from different sources, thus generating new knowledge –Dynamic agent interoperability on the web –Intelligent personalization of information