Ivan Herman, W3C

Questions (and Answers) on the Semantic Web

$Date: 2006/11/25 13:37:12 $
Ivan Herman, W3C
Ivan Herman, W3C
We all know that, right?
The Semantic Web Artificial Intelligence on the Web
It relies on centrally controlled ontologies for meaning
as opposed to a democratic, bottomup control of terms
One has to add metadata to all Web pages, convert all relational databases, and
XML data to use the Semantic Web
It is just an ugly application of XML
One has to learn formal logic, knowledge representation techniques, description
logic, etc
It is, essentially, an academic project, of no interest for industry

Ivan Herman, W3C

WRONG!!!!
The Semantic Web Artificial Intelligence on the Web
It relies on centrally controlled ontologies for meaning
as opposed to a democratic, bottomup control of terms
One has to add metadata to all Web pages, convert all relational databases, and
XML data to use the Semantic Web
It is just an ugly application of XML
One has to learn formal logic, knowledge representation techniques, description
logic, etc
It is, essentially, an academic project, of no interest for industry

Ivan Herman, W3C

Goal of this presentation
There are lots of myths around the Semantic Web
This presentation will try to de-mystify at least some of those
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Is the Semantic Web AI on the Web?
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No!
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So what is the Semantic Web?
Humans can easily connect the dots when browsing the Web
you disregard advertisements
you know (from the context) that this link is interesting and goes to my CV; whereas the that one
is without interest
etc.
but machines cant!
The goal is to have a Web of Data to ensure smooth integration with data, too
Let us see just some application examples
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Example: Automatic Airline Reservation
Your automatic airline reservation
knows about your preferences
builds up knowledge base using your past
can combine the local knowledge with remote services:
airline preferences
dietary requirements
calendaring
etc
It communicates with remote information (i.e., on the Web!)
(M. Dertouzos: The Unfinished Revolution)
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Example: data(base) integration
Databases are very different in structure, in content
Lots of applications require managing several databases
after company mergers
combination of administrative data for e-Government
biochemical, genetic, pharmaceutical research
etc.
Most of these data is accessible on the Web (though not necessarily public yet)
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Example: data integration in life sciences

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And the problem is real
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So what is the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web is the Web of Data
It allows machines to connect the dots
It provides a common framework to share data on the Web across application
boundaries
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And what is the relationship to AI?
Some technologies in the Semantic Web has benefited a lot from AI research and
development (see later)
Semantic Web has also brought some new concerns, problems, use cases to AI
But AI has many many different problems that are not related to the Web at all
(image understanding is a good example)
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A possible comparison
Smarter machines
teach computers to infer the meaning of Web data
natural language, image recognition, etc.
this is the Artificial Intelligence approach
Smarter data
Make data easier for machines to find, access and process
express data and meaning in standard machine-readable format
support decentralized definition and management, across the network
this is the Semantic Web approach
(I know, all comparisons are wrong, but it may still help)
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All right, but what is RDF then?
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RDF
For all applications listed above the issues are
to create relations among resources on the Web and to interchange those data
Pretty much like (hyper)links on the traditional web, except that:
there is no notion of current document; ie, relationship is between any two resources
a relationship must have a name: a link to my CV should be differentiated from a link to my
Calendar
there is no attached user-interface action like for a hyperlink
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RDF (cont.)
RDF is a model for such relationships and interchange
to be a bit more techie: it is a model of (s p o) triplets with p naming the relationship between s
and o
URI-s are used as universal naming
tools, including for properties (after all, U stands for Universal)
That is it (essentially)! Nothing very complex
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But isnt RDF simply an (ugly) XML application?
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RDF is a graph!
As we already said: RDF is a set of relationships
An (s,p,o) triple can be viewed as a labeled edge in a graph
i.e., a set of RDF statements is a directed, labeled graph
the nodes represent the resources that are bound
the labeled edges are the relationships with their names
This set must be serialized for machines; this can be done into XML (using
RDF/XML), or to other formats (Turtle, N-Triples, TriX, )
Think in terms of graphs, the rest is syntactic sugar!
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A Simple RDF Example
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.ivan-herman.net">
<foaf:name>Ivan</foaf:name>
<abc:myCalendar rdf:resource="http:///myCalendar"/>
<foaf:surname>Herman</foaf:surname>
</rdf:Description>
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Yes, RDF/XML has its Problems
RDF/XML was developed in the prehistory of XML
e.g., even namespaces did not exist!
Coordination was not perfect, leading to problems
the syntax cannot be checked with XML DTD-s
XML Schemas are also a problem
encoding is verbose and complex (simplifications lead to confusions)
but there is too much legacy code to change it
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Use, e.g., Turtle if you prefer
<http://www.ivan-herman.net>
foaf:firstName "Ivan";
abc:myCalendar <http://.../myCalendar>;
foaf:surname "Herman".
Again: these are all just syntactic sugar!
RDF environments often understand several serialization syntaxes
In some cases, authoring tools hide the details anyway!
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But what has RDF to do with data integration?
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Consider this (simplified) bookstore data set
ID Author Title Publisher Year
ISBN 0-00-651409-X id_xyz The Glass Palace id_qpr 2000

ID Name Home page
id_xyz Amitav Ghosh http://www.amitavghosh.com/

ID Publisher Name City
id_qpr Harper Collins London
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Export your data as a set of relations

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Add the data from another publisher

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Start merging

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Simple integration

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Note the role of URI-s!
The URI-s made the merge possible
URI-s ground RDF into the Web
URI-s make this the Semantic Web
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So what is then the role of ontologies and/or rules?
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A possible short answer
Ontologies/rules are there to help integration
Let us come back to our example
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This is where we are

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Our merge is not complete yet
We feel that a:author and f:auteur should be the same
But an automatic merge doest not know that!
Let us add some extra information to the merged data:
a:author same as f:auteur
both identify a Person:
a term that a community has already defined (part of the FOAF terminology)
a Person is uniquely identified by his/her name and, say, homepage
it can be used as a category for certain type of resources
we can also identify, say, a:name with foaf:name
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Better merge: richer queries are possible!

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What we did: we used ontologies
We said:
a:author same as f:auteur
both identify a Person:
a term that a community has already defined
a Person is uniquely identified by his/her name and, say, homepage
it can be used as a category for certain type of resources
we can also identify, say, a:name with foaf:name
These statements can be described in an ontology (or, alternatively, with rules)
The ontology/rule serves as some sort of a glue
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And then the merge may go on

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and on

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and on

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Is that surprising?
Maybe but, in fact, no
What happened via automatic means is done all the time by the (human) users of
the Web!
The difference: a bit of extra rigor (eg, naming the relationships), extra information
(eg, identifying relationships) and machines could do this, too
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It could become even more powerful
We could add extra knowledge to the merged datasets
e.g., a full classification of various type of library data
geographical information
etc.
This is where ontologies, extra rules, etc, may come in force!
integration on an even higher level
As a consequence, even more powerful queries can be asked
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You remember this statement?
It relies on giant, centrally controlled ontologies for meaning
Ontologies are usually developed by communities and they are to be shared
in fact, in our example, we used an ontology called FOAF
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And this?
One has to learn formal logic, knowledge representation techniques,
description logic, etc, to understand the Semantic Web and be able to use it
This glue does not have to be complex, it may be of a few lines only
a little semantics can take you far
Of course, there are
very complex ontologies, and they are essential for some applications
but they are usually developed by dedicated experts
most of us are just users of these
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Tradeoffs
What can be inferred depends on the level of additional knowledge (ie, glue) one
adds to the original data
More complex ontologies: more inference possibilities, but more complex
reasoning procedures
At present, W3C has defined a set of ontology languages (and is working on
rules)
An application may choose the complexity it wants
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Also
Yes, the detailed semantics of RDFS, OWL Lite, etc, are based on knowledge
representation algorithms
OWL-DL stands for OWL Description Logic; it is an embodiment of a Description Logic
but most users just have to use these
It is just like SQL: the formal semantics is very
complex, but 95% of the SQL users have never even looked at it!
Developing
and ontology may require more knowledge, but that is for a small percentage of
users (and there are authoring tools to hide the details)
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So what does inference means on the Semantic Web?
How do you deduce things?
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Remember the same as?
We said: a:name same as foaf:name
What this meant, in ontology terms:
if (P a:name L) is present, then (P foaf:name L) should be present, too (and vice versa)
But what this also means is that:
whereas (P a:name L) is in the original data
(P foaf:name L) is an added (or deduced) relationship by virtue of the ontology we used
Ie: inference means discovery of new relationships!
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Where do the data and ontologies come from?
(Should we really expect the author to type in all this data?)
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Pure RDF data: not always a solution
Creating large scale RDF data with an editor is possible, but does not really
scale
although it may be o.k. for small things like the glue in our example
Even if it is around: adding RDF to, say, XHTML, is not always easy
there are number of disagreeable technical problems with, eg, validation
the only clean approach today is to link it via a meta header element
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Data may be around already
Part of the (meta)data information is present in tools but thrown away at output
e.g., a business chart can be generated by a tool
it knows the structure, the classification, etc. of the chart, but, usually, this information is lost
storing it in web data would be easy!
SW-aware tools are around (even if you do not know it), though more would
be good:
Photoshop CS stores metadata in RDF in, say, jpg files (referred to as XMP)
RSS 1.0 feeds are generated by (almost) all blogging systems (a huge amount of RDF data!)

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Data may be extracted (a.k.a. scraped)
Different tools, services, etc, come around every day:
get RDF data associated with images, for example:
service to get RDF from flickr images (see example)
service to get RDF from XMP (see example)
XSLT scripts to retrieve microformat based information from XHTML files
scripts to convert spreadsheets to RDF
etc
Most of these tools are still individual hacks, but show a general tendency
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Formalizing the scraper approach: GRDDL
GRDDL formalizes the scraper approach. For example:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/">
<head profile="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view">
<title>Some Document</title>
<link rel="transformation" href="http:/dc-extract.xsl"/>
<meta name="DC.Subject" content="Some subject"/>
...
</head>
...
<span class="date">2006-01-02</span>
...
</html>
yields, by running the file through dc-extract.xsl
<rdf:Description rdf:about="">
<dc:subject>Some subject</dc:subject>
<dc:date>2006-01-02</dc:date>
</rdf:Description>
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GRDDL (cont)
Somebody has to provide dc-extract.xsl
and use its conventions (making use of the corresponding meta-s, class id-s,
etc)
but, by using the profile
attribute, a client is instructed to find and run the transformation processor
automatically
A bridge to microformats
A W3C Working Group
has just started, with a recommendation planned in the 1st Quarter of 2007
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Another Future Solution: RDFa
RDFa (formerly known as RDF/A) extends XHTML by:
extending the link and meta elements to include children
defining general attributes to add metadata to any elements (a bit like the class in microformats,
but via dedicated properties)
It is very similar to microformats, but with more rigor:
it is a general framework (instead of an agreement on the meaning of, say, a class attribute
value)
terminologies can be mixed more easily
The W3C Working Group on SW Deployment has this on its charter
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RDFa example
For example
<div about="http://uri.to.newsitem">
<span property="dc:date">March 23, 2004</span>
<span property="dc:title">Rollers hit casino for 1.3m</span>
By <span property="dc:creator">Steve Bird</span>. See
<a href="http://www.a.b.c/d.avi" rel="dcmtype:MovingImage">
also video footage</a>
</div>
yields, by running the file through a processor:
<http://uri.to.newsitem>
dc:date "March 23, 2004";
dc:title "Rollers hit casino for 1.3m;
dc:creator "Steve Bird";
dcmtype:MovingImage <http://www.a.b.c/d.avi>.
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Linking to SQL
A huge amount of data in Relational Databases
Although tools exist, it is not feasible to convert that data into RDF
Instead: SQL RDF bridges are being developed:
a query to RDF data is transformed into SQL on-the-fly
the modalities are governed by small, local ontologies or rules
An active area of development!
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Common in RDFa and GRDDL
The user authors XHTML as usual
The result is displayed as usual
The author may add some annotations that leads to RDF
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And for Ontologies?
The hard work is to create the ontologies in general
requires a good knowledge of the area to be described
some communities have good expertise already (e.g., librarians)
OWL is just a tool to formalize ontologies
Large scale ontologies are often developed in a community process
leading to versioning issues, too
OWL includes predicates for versioning, deprecation, same-ness,
There is also R&D in generating them from a corpus of data
still mostly a research subject
Sharing ontologies may be vital in the process
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There are already ontologies around
Lots of ontologies registered at Schemaweb
DAML ontology library has several hundreds of ontologies
Ontologies are being developed by various communities:
medical domain (e.g., the US Cancer Institutes Cancer Ontology, the Gene Ontology, the BioPax
Molecular Pathway Ontology, )
cultural heritage domain (e.g., CIDOC reference model and ontology)
OWL representation of (English) Wordnet
eBusiness ontology for products and services: eClassOwl

Use existing ontologies when you can!

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Core vocabularies
A number of public core vocabularies evolve to be used by applications, e.g.:
SKOS Core: about knowledge systems
Dublin Core: about information resources, digital libraries, with extensions for rights, permissions,
digital right management
FOAF: about people and their organizations
DOAP: on the descriptions of software projects
MusicBrainz: on the description of CDs, music tracks,
SIOC: Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
vCard in RDF

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A mix of ontologies/vocabularies (life sciences)
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How do I extract triplets from and RDF Graph? Ie: how
do I query an RDF Graph?
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Querying RDF graphs
RDBS model has a query language: SQL
RDF (graph) model needs a query language: SPARQL
query graph patterns
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Simple SPARQL Example
SELECT ?cat ?val # note: not ?x!
WHERE { ?x rdf:value ?val. ?x category ?cat }
Returns: [["Total Members",100],["Total Members",200],,["Full
Members",10],]
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Other SPARQL features
Define optional patterns
Limit the number of returned results; remove duplicates, sort them,
Add functional constraints to pattern matching
Return a full subgraph (instead of a list of bound variables)
Use datatypes and/or language tags when matching a pattern
SPARQL is not yet finalized, but will become a Recommendation (hopefully) in 2
nd
Quarter of 2007
but there are a number of implementations already!
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SPARQL usage in practice
Locally, i.e., bound to a programming environment like RDFLib or Jena
details are language dependent
Remotely, e.g., over the network or into a database
very important usage: a growing number of RDF depositories
separate documents define the protocol and the result format
SPARQL Protocol for RDF
SPARQL Results XML Format
there is also a JSON binding (soon a W3C note)
An application pattern evolves: use (XHTML) forms to create a SPARQL Query to
a database and display the result in XHTML
there are a number of application experiments, demos, etc.,
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SPARQL as a federating tool
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Isn't This Research Only?
(or: does this have any industrial relevance whatsoever?)
Ivan Herman, W3C
Not any more
Lots of tools are available. Are listed on W3Cs wiki:
RDF programming environment for 14+ languages, including C, C++, Python, Java, Javascript,
Ruby, PHP, (no Cobol or Ada yet !)
13+ Triple Stores, ie, database systems to store (sometimes huge!) datasets
a number programming environments (in Java, Prolog, ) include OWL reasoners
there are also stand-alone reasoners (downloadable or on the Web)
etc
Some of the tools are Open Source, some are not; some are very mature, some
are not : it is the usual picture of software tools, nothing special any more!
Anybody can start developing RDF-based applications today
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Not any more (cont)
SW has indeed a strong foundation in research results
But remember:
(1) the Web was born at CERN 1.
(2) was first picked up by high energy physicists 2.
(3) then by academia at large 3.
(4) then by small businesses and start-ups 4.
(5) big business came only later! 5.
network effect kicked in early
Semantic Web is now at #4, and moving to #5!
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Network effect
Metcalfes Law:
the value of one node is proportional to the number of other nodes
Rely on: Visionaries who can imagine what it would be like
and those who do their bit trust that others will do theirs
Easier with things which are well connected
Easier to get critical mass in small community
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Small community: niche applications
The needs of a deployment application area:
have serious problem or opportunity
have the intellectual interest to pick up new things
have motivation to fix the problem
its data connects to other application areas
have an influence as a showcase for others
The high energy physics community played this role for the Web in the 90s
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Some RDF deployment areas
Library metadata Defence Life sciences
Problem to
solve?
single-domain
integration
yes, serious data
integration needs
yes, connections among
genetics, proteomics, clinical
trials, regulatory,
Willingness to
adopt?
yes: OCLC push and
Dublin Core initiative
yes: funded early
DAML (OWL)
work
yes: intellectual level high,
much modeling done already.
Motivation light strong very strong
Links to other library data
phone calls
records, etc
chemistry, regulatory,
medical, etc
Showcase? limited not at all
yes, model for other
industries.
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Some RDF deployment areas (cont)
These are just examples
Others are coming to the fore: eGovernment, energy sector (oil industry), financial
services,
Health care and life science sector is now very active
also at W3C, in the form of an Interest Group
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The corporate landscape is moving
Major companies offer (or will offer) Semantic Web tools or systems using
Semantic Web: Adobe, Oracle, IBM, HP, Software AG, webMethods, Northrop
Gruman, Altova,
Some of the names of active participants in W3C SW related groups: ILOG, HP,
Agfa, SRI International, Fair Isaac Corp., Oracle, Boeing, IBM, Chevron, Siemens,
Nokia, Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sun, Citigroup,
Corporate Semantic Web listed as major technology by Gartner in 2006
The Semantic Technology Conference series also attract lots of participants
speakers in 2006: from IBM, Cisco, BellSouth, GE, Walt Disney, Nokia, Oracle,
not all referring to Semantic Web (eg, RDF, OWL, ) but semantics in general
but they might come around!
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Applications are not always very complex
Eg: simple semantic annotations of patients data greatly enhances
communications among doctors
What is needed: some simple ontologies, an RDFa/microformat type editing
environment
Simple but powerful!
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Data integration
Data integration comes to the fore as one of the SW Application areas
Very important for large application areas (life sciences, energy sector,
eGovernment, financial institutions), as well as everyday applications (eg,
reconciliation of calendar data)
Life sciences example:
data in different labs
data aimed at scientists, managers, clinical trial participants
large scale public ontologies (genes, proteins, antibodies, )
different formats (databases, spreadsheets, XML data, XHTML pages)
etc
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Example: antibodies demo
Scenario: find the known antibodies for a protein in a specific species
Combine (scrape) three different data sources
Use SPARQL as an integration tool (see also demo online)
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There has been lots of R&D
Boeing, MITRE Corp., Elsevier, EU Projects like Sculpteur and Artiste, national
projects like MuseoSuomi, DartGrid,
Developments are under way at various places in the area
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Portals
Vodafone's Live Mobile Portal
search application (e.g. ringtone, game, picture) using RDF
page views per download decreased 50%
ringtone up 20% in 2 months
A number of other portal examples: Suns White Paper Collections
and System Handbook collections; Nokias S60 support portal;
Harpers Online magazine linking items via an internal ontology;
Oracles virtual press room; Operas community site, Yahoo!
Food,
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Improved Search via Ontology: GoPubMed
Improved search on top of pubmed.org
search results are ranked using the specialized ontologies
extra search terms are generated and terms are highlighted
Importance of domain specific ontologies for search improvement
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Adobe's XMP
Adobes (public) tool to add RDF-based metadata to most of their file formats
supported in Adobe Creative Suite
support from 30+ major asset management vendors, with separate XMP conferences; will be used
in Windows Vista
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Baby CareLink
Centre of information for the treatment of premature babies
Provides an OWL service as a Web Service
combines disparate vocabularies like medical, insurance, etc
users can add new entries to ontologies
complex questions can be asked through the service
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Summary
The Semantic Web is not as complex as people believe
The Semantic Web does not require huge investments before seeing its value
The Semantic Web is not only for geeks
Ivan Herman, W3C

Thank you for your attention!
These slides are publicly available on:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/CorePresentations/SW_QA/
in XHTML and PDF formats; the XHTML version has active links that you can follow
Ivan Herman, W3C

Thank you for your attention!