Semantic Web &Web Services

UNIT – 1
Mukesh Kumar
Department of CSE
 Syllabus
UNIT-1
Introduction to Semantic Web: History of
Semantic Web, goals and vision, problems,
Semantic Web Technologies, Layered
Approach, Syntactic vs semantic web,
Applications of semantic web.
 Introduction to Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide
Web through standards by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C).
Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that
provides an easier way to find, share, reuse and
combine information.
It is based on machine-readable information and builds
on XML technology's capability to define customized
tagging schemes and RDF's
(Resource Description Framework) flexible approach
to representing data.
The Semantic Web provides common
formats for the interchange of data
(where on the Web there is only an
interchange of documents). It also
provides a common language for
recording how data relates to real world
objects, allowing a person or a machine
to start off in one database, and then
move through an unending set of
databases which are connected not by
wires but by being about the same thing.
 Limitation of HTML
• Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into
human readable documents and machine readable data.
• Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are
read by humans.
• Data, such as calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and
spreadsheets are presented using an application program that
lets them be viewed, searched and combined.
• Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents
written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup
convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed
with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms.
Metadata tags provide a method by which computers
can categorize the content of web pages, for example:
<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer" />
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale" />
<meta name="author" content="John Doe" />
 Goal and Vision of Semantic Web
Goal:
The goal of the Semantic Web is to associate meaning
with the data on the Web and to exploit the wealth
of data on the Web through more intelligent
(meaningful) processing.
A semantic approach to data processing, such as the
use of ontologies or knowledge bases, has
increasingly been integrated with other AI
techniques, especially machine learning (ML) and
natural language processing (NLP).
 Goal and Vision of Semantic Web
Vision:
The vision Semantic web is as:
“A new form of Web content that is meaningful to
computers will unleash a revolution of new
possibilities.”
This Web of structured data would enable
automated assistants (called software agents) to
operate on our behalf, autonomously completing
tasks, and in the process, greatly simplifying and
enriching our online experience.
 Problems with Semantic Web
1. The availability of content.
Currently, there is little Semantic Web
content available. Existing web content
should be upgraded to Semantic Web
content including static HTML pages, existing
XML content, and dynamic content,
multimedia and web services.
 Problems with Semantic Web
2. Ontology availability, development and evolution.
Ontologies will become a key piece, as they allow
expliciting the semantics of Semantic Web content. A
big effort must be made in the creation of common
widely used ontologies for the Semantic Web, on the
provision of adequate infrastructure for ontology
development, change management and mapping,
and, in this distributed web environment, on the
adequate control of the evolution of ontologies and
the annotations referring to them.
 Problems with Semantic Web
3. Scalability.
A significant effort must be made to organize
Semantic Web content, store it and provide the
necessary mechanisms to find it. All these tasks must
be performed and coordinated in a scalable manner,
as these solutions should be prepared for the huge
growth of the Semantic Web.
 Problems with Semantic Web
4. Multilinguality.
This problem already exists in the current Web, and
should also be tackled in the Semantic Web. Any
Semantic Web approach should provide facilities to
access information in several languages, allowing the
creation and access to SW content independently of
the native language of content providers and users.
 Problems with Semantic Web
5. Visualization.
Intuitive visualization of Semantic Web content will
become more and more important to solve the
increasing amount of information overload, as users
will demand the easy recognition of relevant content
for their purposes. New techniques must be explored
that differ from the usual hypertext structure
visualization of the current web.
 Problems with Semantic Web
6. Stability of Semantic Web languages.
Finally, standardization efforts must be performed
urgently in this emerging field, in order to allow the
creation of the necessary technology that supports
the Semantic Web.
 Semantic Web Technologies
“The core difference between Semantic Technologies
and other technologies for data, the relational
database for instance, is that the Semantic
Technology deals with the meaning rather than the
structure of the data.
In terms of Semantic Technology, the standards that
apply are primarily the Resource Description
Framework (RDF), SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF
Query Language), and optionally OWL (Web
Ontology Language).
 Semantic Web Technologies
• RDF(S), or triples, is the format the Semantic Technology uses
to store data in graph databases.
• SPARQL is the semantic query language of the Semantic Web,
which is specifically designed to query data across various
systems and databases and to retrieve and process data
stored in RDF format.
• (optionally) OWL is the computational logic-based language
which is designed to show the data schema and represents
rich and complex knowledge about hierarchies of things and
the relations between things. It is complementary to RDF and
allows for formalizing a data schema/ontology in a given
domain, separately from the data itself.
Layered Approach
 Layered Approach
• Unicode and URI: Unicode, the standard for
computer character representation, and URIs, the
standard for identifying and locating resources (such
as pages on the Web), provide a baseline for
representing characters used in most of the
languages in the world, and for identifying resources.
• XML: XML and its related standards, such as
Namespaces, and Schemas, form a common means
for structuring data on the Web but without
communicating the meaning of the data. These are
well established within the Web already.
 Layered Approach
• Resource Description Framework: RDF is the first
layer of the Semantic Web proper. RDF is a simple
metadata representation framework, using URIs to
identify Web-based resources and a graph model for
describing relationships between resources. Several
syntactic representations are available, including a
standard XML format.
• RDF Schema: a simple type modeling language for
describing classes of resources and properties
between them in the basic RDF model. It provides a
simple reasoning framework for inferring types of
resources.
 Layered Approach
• Ontologies: a richer language for providing more
complex constraints on the types of resources and
their properties.
• Logic and Proof: an (automatic) reasoning system
provided on top of the ontology structure to make
new inferences. Thus, using such a system, a
software agent can make deductions as to whether a
particular resource satisfies its requirements (and
vice versa).
 Layered Approach
• Trust: The final layer of the stack addresses issues of
trust that the Semantic Web can support. This
component has not progressed far beyond a vision of
allowing people to ask questions of the
trustworthiness of the information on the Web, in
order to provide an assurance of its quality.
 Syntactic Vs Semantic Web
Syntactic web:
In reality the "semantic web" is, and can only ever be, a ''syntactic
web''.
Syntax is merely form –
• the shape of arbitrary objects called symbols , within a formal
notational system adopted by an agreed and shared convention.
• Computation is the rule-based manipulation of those symbols,
with the rules and manipulations ("algorithms") based purely
and mechanically on the shapes of the symbols, not their
meaning
• Even though most of the individual symbols as well as the
combinations of symbols are systematically interpretable (by
human minds) as having meaning.
 Syntactic Vs Semantic Web
• Semantic web:
Semantics, in contrast, concerns the meanings of the symbols,
not their shape, or the syntactic manipulation of their shapes.
Syntax is symbol-shape-manipulation, independent of meaning
Semantics is defined as what it is that the symbols actually mean