WWW2002 W3C Track - The Semantic Web

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WWW2002 W3C Track - The Semantic Web

• by Eric Miller

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Outline

• WWW2002 W3C Track - The Semantic Web
• Outline for the Track
• What is the Semantic Web?
• Information on the Current Web
• Information on the Semantic Web
• The Current Web
• The Semantic Web - A Logical Extension to the
  Current Web
• The Semantic Web - The original web realized
• Enabling Technologies - Layer Cake
• Goals of the Semantic Web Activity
• How we're building the Semantic Web

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Outline for the Track

• What is the Semantic Web?
• Overview, goals and objectives
• Implementation Strategies
• Enabling Standards
• RDF Core - Brian McBride
• Web Ontology - Jim Hendler
• Semantic Web Advanced Development - Ralph Swick
• Overview, goals and objectives
• SWAD MIT - SWAD Europe
• Where we are at, where we are going
• Semantic Web Demonstration - Eric Miller and Tim
  Berners-Lee
• Semantic Search
• Questions, Answers, Discussion

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What is the Semantic Web?

• The Semantic Web is an extension of the current
  Web that will allow you to find, share, and
  combine information more easily.
• "The bane of my existence is doing things that I
  know the computer could do for me." -- Dan
  Connolly, The XML Revolution

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Information on the Current Web

• The current Web represents information using
• Natural language (e.g., English)
• Graphics, multimedia
• Page layout
• Okay for humans
• Difficult for machine processing (ambiguity,
  unconstrained data formats)

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Information on the Semantic Web

• Extends the current Web
• Allows you to
• Express information in a format that is
• Unambiguous
• Amenable to machine processing
• Add metadata (to describe existing or new data)
• "A globally linked database"

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The Current Web

• Resources
• identified by URI's
• untyped
• Links
• href, src, ...
• limited, non-descriptive
• User
• Exciting world - but, the characteristics of the
  documents is clear to those with a grasp of
  (normally) English.
• Machine
• Very little information available - significance
  of the links only evident from the context around
  the anchor.

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The Semantic Web

• A Logical Extension to the Current Web
• Resources
• Common naming syntax (URI's)
• Extensible Relational
• Links
• Common naming syntax (URI's)
• Extensible Relational
• User
• Even more exciting world, richer user experience
• Machine
• More processable information is available
• Computers and people
• Work, learn and exchange knowledge effectively

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The Semantic Web - The original web realized

• The original proposal of the WWW from 1989
  included a figure showing how information about a
  Web of relationships among named objects could
  unify a number of information management tasks.
• Information Management A Proposal, Tim
  Berners-Lee, CERN, March 1989, May 1990,

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Enabling Technologies Layer Cake
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Goals of the Semantic Web Activity

• Define conventions for applications that exchange
  metadata on the Web
• Enable vocabulary semantics to be defined by
  communities of expertise, not W3C
• Provide for the fine-grained mixing of diverse
  metadata
• Making it cost-effective for people to
  effectively record their knowledge.
• Ultimate goal - the design of enabling
  technologies to support machine facilitated
  global knowledge exchange