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9 1. The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a "man-made woven web of data" that facilitates machines to understand the semantics, or meaning, of information on the World Wide Web.It extends the network of hyperlinked human-readable web pages by inserting machine-readable metadata about pages and how they are related to each other, enabling us to access the Web more intelligently and perform tasks on behalf of users. The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C"), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. He defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines." The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. The word semantic stands for the meaning of: The Semantic Web = a Web with a meaning ie. for the computer. In the Semantic Web data itself becomes part of the Web and is able to be processed independently of application, platform, or domain. This is in contrast to the World Wide Web which contains virtually boundless information in the form of documents. We can use computers to search for these documents, but they still have to be read and interpreted by humans before any useful information can be used. Computers can present you with information but cant understand what the information is to display the data that is most relevant in a given circumstance. The Semantic Web is about having data as well as documents on the Web so that machines can process, transform, assemble, and even act on the data in useful ways.
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2. Introduction
Sentences can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers? Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic? This is what the Semantic Web is all about ie.describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is an information space used by machines rather thanhumans. Instead of processing and manipulating Web information, a userwould have a personal agent on his/her computer that would solve problemsrelated to information overload, acquisition and discrepancy resolution.Once an agent has executed the starting level of information management, a userwould access or manipulate the results. In order to execute these tasks, theinformation the agents uses has to be presented in an increasing semantically enriched format by means of several technology layers.In both these versions of the Semantic Web architecture, a higher level layer language use the syntax and semantics of its immediate lower level layer. The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database. The increasing usage of the current World Wide Web leads to a new challenge of optimizingthe interchange of information, due to the fact that a huge amount of data is interpretable by humans only. Currently the focus of a W3C working group, the Semantic Web vision was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Calling it the next step in Web evolution, Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.

Semantic Web technologies helpseparate meanings from data,document content, or application code,using technologies based on openstandards. You can think of the Semantic Web asan efficient way to represent data onthe World Wide Web, or as a databasethat is globally linked, in a mannerunderstandable by machines, to thecontent of documents on the WebPage.

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3. A Vision of Possibilities
Semantic web on the cusp of something big.The Semantic Web is built up by techniques such as XML, RDF, ontologies and logic. The content of the Semantic Web is represented by ontologies and metadata. Further the definitions will be extended by axioms,algorithms. Trust and proof can be applied by the use of digital signatures. Figure of the 1: The layer structure Semantic Web.

3.1 Components of Semantic Web

Several formats and languages form the building blocks of the semantic web. Some of these include Identifiers: Uniform Resource Identifier(URI), Documents : Extensible MarkupLanguage(XML), Statements : Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3) and notations such as RDF Schemas(RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal desription of concepts, terms and relastionships within a given knowledge domain ,Logic,Proof and Trust.
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3.3 Mining the Semantic Web

It is like web-mining.The precondition for managing knowledge in an automatic way, instead of accessing unstructured material, is to add semantic annotation to Web documents. A computer can hardly be enabled to fully consider background knowledge, experience or social conventions. The process of ontology merging takes asinput two or more source ontologies and returns a merged one based on the given sourceontologies. Semantics can be exploited for different purposes. The first major application area is the explicit encoding of semantics for mining the Web content. It comprises techniques for classification,regression, clustering and association analysis to look for patterns that involvemultiple relations in a relational database. While its critics have questioned its feasibility, applications in industry, biology and human sciences research prove the validity of the original concept. The Semantic Web as originally envisioned is a system that enables machines to understand and respond to complex human requests based on their meaning. There is no escaping the fact, the availability of understandable and intelligible information, even in automated processing, needs time for preparation. The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share, and combine information more easily. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as reserving a library book, and searching for the lowest price for a DVD. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the Semantic Web as follows: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A Semantic Web, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content, information applications and systems. Rapid growth in the volume of data on the web doesnt always
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provide the right and exact data.The Semantic Web landscape is charted and a brief summary of related terms and enabling technologies is presented.

3.4 Semantic blogging

Semantic blogging, like semantic publishing, may change the way blogs are read. Currently "the process of blogging inherently emphasizes metadata creation more than traditional Web publishing methodologies". Some blog users already tag their entries with topics, allowing for easier migration into a semantic web environment. It is intentionally saved in not only a human-readable format, but also in a machine-readable format as the tags can be linked easily to other blogs containing similar information. RSS feeds are another way that blogs already have machine-readable data that is easily accessible by the semantic web.

3.5 Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0'. "Semantic Web" is sometimes used as a synonym for "Web 3.0", though each term's definition may vary depending on whom you ask. Many believe that Web 3.0 is the "next big thing"but there only lies speculation as to just what that might be. It will be an improvement in the respect that it will still contain Web 2.0 properties while continuing to add to its ever expanding lexicon and library of applications. There are some who claim that Web 3.0 will be more application based and even more applicable use and growth of Artificial Intelligence.Web 3.0 is where the computer is generating new information, rather than humans and access a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource.

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4. Understanding Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is not a very fast growing technology.

RDF was developed by people with academic background in logic and artificial intelligence. For traditional developers it is not very easy to understand.One fast growing language for building semantic web applications is RSS. The Semantic Web agent does not include artificial intelligence rather, it relies on structured sets of information and inference rules that allow it to understand the relationship between different data resources. The computer doesnt really understand information the way a human can, but it has enough information to make logical connections and decisions.

4.1 Broadening Our Horizons

The vision of the Semantic Web is a web of data that not only harnesses the seemingly endless amount of data on the World Wide Web, but also connects that information with data in relational databases and other non-interoperable information repositories.In addition, relational databases already include a great deal of semantic information. Databases are organized in tables and columns based on the relationships between the data they house, and these relationships reveal the meaning (the semantics) of the data. The Semantic Web, however, allows a machine to connect to any other machine and exchange and process data efficiently based on built-in, universally available semantic information that describes each resource. In effect, the Semantic Web will allow us to access all the information listed above as one huge database. The next step towards the Semantic Web requires that data from multiple domains is classified based on its properties and its relationship with other data. This is where Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, RDFS, and OWL come in. Data that is geneally hidden away in HTML files is often useful in some contexts, but not in others. The problem with the majority of data on the Web that is in this form at the moment is that it is difficult to use on a large scale.

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4.2 Need
The idea of a semantic web, able to describe and associate meaning with data necessarily involves more than simple HTML mark-up code. It is based on an assumption that in order for it to be possible for machines to accurately interpret web content, far more than the mere (natural language) ordered relationships involving letters and words is necessary - as underlying infrastructure attendant to semantic issues. If information about music, cars, tickets, etc. were stored in RDF files, intelligent web applications could collect information from many different sources, combine information, and present it to users in a meaningful way. Information like this:

Car prices Information about movies Information about books (price, pages, editor, year) Dates of events Computer updates

The semantic web augments the current web with formalised knowledge and data that can beprocessed by computers. Some services will mix human readable and structured data so thatthey can be used by both humans and computers. Others will support only formalized knowledge and will only be used by machines. This will enable: computers to assist human users in tasks; the computers can understand the data inways they cannot today, the creation of a more open market in information processing and computer servicesenabling the creation of new applications and services from combinations of existingservices. It will be beneficial for the society as a whole: for the economy because it will allowcompanies to better interoperate and to quickly find the best opportunities. It will benefitcitizens because it will support them in their day-to-day work, leisure and interaction withorganisation and because it will help them to enforce the degree of control they want overtheir personal data, preferences, etc.). Nevertheless, for the semantic web to happen, it is not just a matter of technology. It involvestechnology, economics, and social matters. A trade-off must be found between these domainsthat could lead to a value adding, appealing, and easy to use semantic web.

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4.3 Challenges
The goal of the semantic web is to be a web talking to machines, i.e. in which machines canprovide a better help to people because they can take advantage of the content of the Web. Theinformation on the web should thus be expressed in a meaningful way accessible to computers.The key requirement for the semantic web is interoperability. If machines have to takeadvantage of web resources, they must be able to access them and use them. They must be given some freedom and be able to publishe information in a human or tool-oriented format: theymust be invokable and published in an open, structured and rich format that let the machinesmake the best out of them. One of the challenges of the current semantic web developments is the design of a frameworkin which all these understanding can collaborate, because the full benefit of the semantic webcan only be attained when computers relate resources from various sources. One of the greatest challenges for the Semantic Web is achieving web-scale. While the information retrieval community has developed successful strategies for coping with the scale of the web using statistical techniques, semantic web technologies are still struggling with scaling up to the web as such. This is in part due to the need to preserve the datas structure and the need to perform various forms of reasoning in order to more effectively leverage the available information.To handle vast amount of data. Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency, and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web. Vastness: The World Wide Web contains at least 24 billion pages as of this writing (June 13, 2010). The SNOMED CT medical terminology ontology contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs. Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness. Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.
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Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because "anything follows from a contradiction". Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed to deal with inconsistency. Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat. Eg. E-commerce, data searching.

4.4 Application of Semantic Web

Buying and selling used cars. Suppose a semantic web system was built to administer the selling and buying of used cars over the Internet. The system would contain two main applications: One for people who wanted to buy a car One for people who wanted to put up a car for sale Let's call the Internet applications for IBA (I Buy Application), and ISA (I Sell Application). IBA - The I Buy Application People who want to buy a car could use an IBA application much like this: I Buy Application (IBA) In a "real live" application you would be asked to identify yourself the first time you used it. Your ID would be stored in an RDF file.When you submitted the query, the application would return a list of cars for sale, and the list could be drilled down and sorted by year, price, location and availability. This information would be returned from a web spider continuously searching the web for RDF files. ISA - The I Sell Application People who want to sell a car could use an ISA application much like this:

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I Sell Application (ISA) When you submitted the form, the application would ask you for more information and store your ID and the information in an RDF file made available to the web. The RDF file would contain information like: Your ID: Name, address, email, ID number. Your selling item: type, model, picture, price, description. Behind the scenes, the "ISA" application creates an RDF file with a lot of RDF pointers. It creates an RDF pointer to a file with information about you. An RDF pointer is a pointer (actually an URL) to information about things (like a knowledge database). The beauty about this is that you don't have to describe yourself, or the car model. The RDF application will sort it out for you. RDF is data about data - or metadata. Often RDF files describe other RDF files. Will it ever be possible to link all these RDF files together and build a semantic web? I dont think the semantic web will work all by itself. It will need some help to become a reality. It is not very likely that you will be able to sell your car just by putting your RDF file on the Internet. One day you will be able to collect information about almost everything on the web in a standardized RDF format.It might not be free.Searching information about things on the Internet will be much easier than before.

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5. The Perils and Promises of the Semantic Web

If computers become more adept at pulling together data from different sources?In the movie Terminator, humanity slid down the path to destruction when a supercomputer called Skynet started to become smarter on its own. I was reminded of that possibility during my report on the semantic Web. The most general definition is that the semantic Web speaks to how we are moving from a Web of documents to a Web of linked data. You might think that Google algorithms do a fine job of finding information and organizing the Web. These semantic Web visionaries would like humans to work with machines to make the data we create more easily accessible and analyzed. This is the fundamental difference between linked documents (what Google does) and linked data. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, says the semantic Web will give information a well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. If machines can look at all documents and pull out the who, what, when and where (and someday how and why) so other machines can understand them in a standardized way, then all sorts of interesting opportunities arise for how that information can be found and used. Names and places and ideas and even emotions expressed in stories become much more than just words in one story; they become the way that all of the information in many documents can be linked and layered together to create new documents and stories. The goal is to generate better answers using organized data.

5.1 Threat to Some News

But if semantic Web tools become robot helpers for journalists, could the technology become so smart it will replace some reporters? Yes and no. Even advocates of the semantic Web say machines will not be able tell complex stories with nuances and context or convey emotion or insights any time soon. Imagine if data from wedding licenses could be combined with the educational and birth certificates of the happy couple along with weather statistics and their bridal registry or Facebook page. One of the original grand visions for the semantic Web was that by standardizing information so computers can read it, machines could start to be our personal agents, anticipating our needs, and seeking out information on our behalf.
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The Web is messy and filled with contradictory and unclear information that still needs human interpretation. Semantic Web advocates know the Internet will remain confusing for machines because we humans keep changing it in unexpected ways, not to mention our habit of inventing new words and meaning.

5.2 Looking Ahead

While the semantic Web promises a world where machines can combine data from an infinite number of sources for usperhaps someday with a Skynet avatar delivering customized news based on where you are and what you are doingthe real promise for journalists is that it should soon offer us easy access to thousands of sources of raw data that we will use to tell meaningful stories about our communities. Humans still will be needed to analyze and use the data to tell stories. In this way, the semantic Web might not be a technology that hastens the end of journalism but instead offers a new beginning.

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CONCLUSION

There exist slightly differing application and usage patterns of Social Software between the two groups, but the general trend says: Wikis are king! Social Bookmarking stays behind. There exists broad consent about the benefits of Social Software. Both groups say that quick access to information and knowledge is the biggest benefit generated by Social Software, followed by social networking functionalities and ubiquitous access to documents and data. Search is the killer app! Integration costs & data control might be important aspects. The expected time to market is 2 5 years. The Semantic Web lets you do things fast. And because you can do things fast, you can do lots more things than you could before. The word 'fast" can be a bit deceptive when talking about technology. We can all be a bit obsessed with what I call stopwatch time. Stopwatch time is speed measured in seconds (or less). It's raw performance: How much quicker does my laptop boot up with an SSD? How long does it take to load 100 million records into a database? How many queries per second does your SPARQL implementation do on the Berlin benchmark with and without a recent round of optimizations? If my relational database application renders* a sales forecast report in 500 milliseconds while my Semantic Web application takes 5 seconds, you might hear people say that the relational approach is 10 times faster than the Semantic Web approach. But if it took six months to design and build the relational solution versus two weeks for the Semantic Web solution, Semantic Sam will be adjusting his supply chain and improving his efficiencies long before Relational Randy has even seen his first report.

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REFERENCES

www.w3c.com www.scientificamerican.com www.semanticweb.com www.seminarprojects.com www.owlinvestigation.com www.elearning.com www.cse.iit.ac.in/SemanticWeb

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