27-07-2012, 12:05 PM
SEMANTIC WEB
ABSTRACT
The word semantic stands for the meaning of. The semantic of something is the meaning of something. The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool. John Lennon was a member of the Beatles. The record "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles. Sentences like these 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. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand. The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages. The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price).
The Semantic Web is a “web of data” that enables 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 automated agents 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, 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.”
It is often used more specifically to refer to the formats and technologies that enable it. These technologies include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.