HTML5, Ontology, and Web 3.0 Ism 158 May 13, 2010 Julian Chytrowski

What is Ontology, in a web based context? What is the semantic web, and how is it different from the social web? What does HTML5 mean for the semantic web? What are the benefits of semantics and ontology? How does the tech behind semantic understanding work? The challenges, and why semantics can never be a complete solution.

Web Iterations; Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0 We have already begun the transition between Web 1.0 and 2.0 ; Web 2.0 is the social web; its differentiated by the emphasis on social networking, meaning search results are increasingly determined by popularity and perceived relevance to search terms. It embodies “wisdom of the crowd.” The next Step is Web 3.0, the Semantic Web; Web 3.0 results are determined by an AI agent, tailors results to the semantics of the query based upon the ontological tags embedded in the search results. The results might be described as “wisdom of the machine.”

HTML5 HTML5 is slated to be submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium this year. It’s a new standard which will likely expand upon or replace the current Document Oriented Modeling and XHTML standards. These standards are used to ontologically tag content. Proper tagging content with markup metadata in accordance with highly defined hierarchies could make the content of a document understandable to machine logic. Machines are of course much faster at data retrieval, and a system which allows machines to accurately determine relevance greatly enhances the accessibility and relevance of available data.

Just a quick example of ontology in a web context “Rex chews on those” becomes: “ Rex chews on those. ” Ontological tags like this require hierarchies of labels like this: Content: “Rex” Tags: -Animals -Quadrupeds -Canines -Dogs -Rex -Wolves -Hyenas

Tangible Benefits Semantic search engines could dramatically improve the quality of information by speeding up the process of accessing the most useful data in a timely manner. 'Available' knowledge which is irrelevant by the time its found functionally unavailable. Better relevance on queries improves QoS of the search engine, but it also increases QoS of services constructed through queries, by reducing service gap. Reduced service gap means cheaper maintenance and construction, better scalability, and higher QoS. Uniform Resource Identifiers provide a standard for cross referencing a resource across different systems, drastically reducing the difficulties of data integration, and potentially improving comprehensiveness of available data.

Implementation Seeing the potential benefit to ongoing research, the scientific community have been quick to participate in the construction of ontological services for publishing. (CISC) There is a great incentive to collaborate on this project, because increasing the robustness of the semantic system increases the value of everyones stored data; nobody wants to be an island, especially a small island. As a result, there are more than 2 billion links between existing ontological systems, and growing

Imperfections of the Semantic Web Doctorow summarizes the difficulties facing Web 3.0 succinctly in his critique, “MetaCrap”: -Hierarchies aren’t neutral -People are lazy -People Lie -People are careless -Metrics influence results -There’s more than one way to describe something -Relevant data becomes irrelevant if not diligently updated There is no technical solution to human behavior, so human validation will always be useful; The best solution is likely a hybrid of web 2.0's humanized consensus and web 3.0's integration capabilities.

Sources =true&risb=21_T &format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1 &resultsUrlKey=29_T &cisb=22_T &treeMax=true&treeWi dth=0&csi=7907&docNo=1 Integrated Lifecycle of IT Services in a Cloud Environment, Joshi et al

Terminology and Existing Ontological Frameworks RDF- Resource Description Framework OWL- Web Ontology Language XML- Extensible Markup Language XHTML- Extensible HyperText Markup Language DOM –Document Object Model SISC-Semantically Interlinked Scientific Communities