My understanding semantic web

Understanding semantic Web

By, Ayaz Ahmed Shariff K; Sr. Lecturer; Dept of CSE; BITIC-RAK-UAE

MY UNDERSTANDING OF SEMANTIC WEB

Before arriving at understanding the meaning of semantic web, one should know the basic

concepts like web, internet, syntax, and semantics in technology perspective. Let’s

understand each of these with definitions.

What is Syntax?

“The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are

combined to form grammatical sentences.”

Ex: Consider a sentence “I LOVE MY COUNTRY”

Syntax in this sentence is the combination of letters and grammar which forms sentence.

Semantics: “Studying the meaning of the sentence”

Now consider same sentence again “I LOVE MY COUNTRY”, here the semantics of the

sentence describes my love towards my country.

Let’s change the above sentence as “I LIKE MY COUNTRY” or “I MY COUNTRY”.

The syntax of the above sentence definitely changes but the semantics of the sentence does

not change.

Internet: “An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the

world via the TCP/IP protocol.” We can communicate the computers using internet,

however as mimicking a word of unknown language without understanding the meaning,

computer merely mimics you without understanding the information.

Web: “is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a

web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other

multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks.” A web browser retrieves,

presents the resources on the web. Information is identified by Uniform resource identifier

URI. Web browser receives the document retrieved on the web in a language called HTML.

That means web browser can understand only HTML, because HTML language defines the

syntax that a computer can understand. HTML tells the computer how the document to be

displayed to us.

The 2 things the Web does are creating a way to retrieve any document on internet and

also the syntax called HTML which is used to display the document.

The big question arises is Why semantic web when we have a Web which is pretty good?

The answer is in SEMANTICS!!!

Computers today just blindly retrieves us the document we requested. They don’t

understand the meaning behind the web pages retrieved because they understand only



syntax. If we make computer to recognise the information, we can make computers to

actively helping us instead of passively help they do. They can simplify and provide

meaningful information which we desire.

Difference between Web and Semantic Web is?

WEB of today: “is a study of documents”

SEMANTIC WEB: “is study of things”

(Things can be anything like people, places, events, music or any concept we can think of)

“Semantic web is not only just learning these things but also learning computer to

know how these things are related to each other.”

The promising technologies which can embed the semantics into HTML documents are:-

MICROFORMATS

RDFa

Possibilities of semantic web: Semantic web stuff is something which can happen in future

or which is happening today.

Once your computer recognises and understands the things (people, person, place ...) it can

help to act and process on them.

For ex: If you mark your birthday party as an event with date and place then we can say the

computer to save that in a calendar.

Search engines can also become more accurate with semantic webs. Instead of searching on

just a keyword, it can simplify search with more accurate results particular to the meaning

of the keyword.

Overview: Sir Tim Berners‐Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has worked along

with many others in the internet community for more than a decade to achieve his next big

dream: the semantic web. His vision is a web that allows software agents to carry out

sophisticated tasks for users, making meaningful connections between bits of information so

that “computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding,

combining, and acting upon information on the web.”

Debate over semantic web: The concept of the semantic web has been fluid and evolving

and never quite found a concrete expression and easily‐understood application that could be

grasped readily by ordinary internet users. Nevertheless, it has inspired many technologists

and internet experts to improve the performance of the web and it a topic of great interest

in the high‐tech world.

Some 895 experts responded to the invitation of the Pew Research Centre’s Internet &

American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Centre to predict the



likely progress toward achieving the goals of the semantic web by the year 2020. Asked to

think about the likelihood that Berners‐Lee and his allies will realize their vision, often

called Web 3.0, these technology experts and stakeholders were divided and often

contentious.

Some 47% agreed with the statement:

“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners‐Lee will not be as fully effective as its creators

hoped and average users will not have noticed much of a difference.”

Some 41% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

“By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners‐Lee and his allies will have been achieved to

a significant degree and have clearly made a difference to average internet users.”

My thoughts on semantic web: “There are some complex things which need to fall in

place for the semantic web to be fully visualized. The idea is a noble one and gives the

technology community something to shoot for. But there is too much variation among

people and cultures and economic competitors to allow for such a grand effort to come to

full realistic.”

In simple word, If I search “Black Berry” in semantic web search engine, it should either ask

us what are we searching explicitly by displaying the following results or link these results

in single page semantically.

Black Berry has many meanings

1. Black Berry as fruit?

2. Black berry as mobile device?

3. Black berry as company name?

4. Black berry as song?

5. ...

6. ...

Semantic web understands your search in different context and making the search in

precise.

My understanding semantic web

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