Bonyfus's Blog

Semantic Web: The Evolution of World Wide Web

When I started the research on the Semantic Web for my bachelors degree, I didn’t have any clue about what it is?, how it works?, what its final destination?….

After exploring the world of Semantic Web I found Semantic Web as one of the most interesting (for me) and one of the hard to learn aspects in the field of computer science. Because, it covers almost every aspect you could find in computer science such as, imperative and declarative programming, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and logic.

According to Hebeler et al. (2009) Tim Berners-Lee’s (Inventor of WWW) original proposal of Web to CERN was not just retrieving static web documents (pages) through a web server. It was meant to semantically (meaningfully) describe the web documents and data within those documents. Further, it was meant to identify the links (relationships) between the web documents and the data within. However, for some reason Tim Berners-Lee’s original web proposal has not achieved its full potential as required (Don’t ask me the reason I am still looking for it).

Someone might think, why do we need to describe data semantically and identify relationships?. Imagine the amount of data that is in the Web. Wray (2009) reports that internet data heads to 500 Billion GB in the near future. So, how do we easily find the information we want filtering the unwanted from these enormous amount of data. Think about number of hits you get for a search query in google. For example if you run a search on the keyword “Jaguar” in google, you will get all the web pages related to Jaguar cars and Jaguar big cats, though you only wanted to know about the big cat Jaguar. Consequently, to find the relevent information you have to go through a number of web pages and trust me it is a hectic task. When Semantic Web is in action you will get only the highly relevant information for your search query. However, this just one thing Semantic Web can help you to do.

Is Semantic Web a major paradigm shift?  well my answer would be YES. Because Semantic Web will change the way we use data. i.e. the data we have will be organized in a manner where it provides a shared and a common understanding among us as well as computers. Thus, making data to be more useful information. So, How can we ensure a shared and a common understanding of things among humans and computers?.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has developed some technologies (or standards) to represent the data in a meaningful way so that it guarantee a shared and a common understnading. RDF (Resource Description Framework) and  OWL (Web Ontology Language) are two major technologies that was introduced by W3C to make the vision of Semantic Web a reality. These technologies are used to describe the meaning (semantic) and relationships of data in the internet and within an organization. These two knowledge representation technologies have been the building blocks to the evolvement of other similar technologies such as WSML. Furthermore, SPARQL is the standard that was developed by W3C to query the data represented using RDF and OWL. SPARQL is much similar to the SQL and it uses some statements from SQL such as, SELECT, WHERE, and DISTINCT. Will talk about these technologies in deep in later posts

To conclude, it seems like Semantic Web vision will take another 10 to 15 years to get into its full potential. However, the number of researches and developments on Semantic Web technologies around the world adds something to the fruition of Semantic Web vision everyday. After writing this post, I feel like I am an evangelist of Semantic Web who want to send the message and contribute to its development.

References

Hebeler, J. & Fisher, M., Blace, R. & Perez-Lopez, A. (2009), Semantic Web Programming, Wiley Publishing.

Wray, R. (Monday 18^th May 2009 Internet data heads for 500bn gigabytes. The Guardian. [Online] Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion [Accessed 12th March 2010].