VISVESVARAYA TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

Jnana Sangama, Belagavi – 590018

SEMINAR REPORT

on

“SEMANTIC WEB”

Submitted in partial fulfilment for the award of the degree

Bachelor of Engineering
in

Computer Science and Engineering

Submitted by
AKASH RAJ K 1ST19CS009

Under the Guidance of

Prof. Deepa S Bhat
Department of CSE

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

SAMBHRAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

M. S. Palya, Bengaluru – 560097

2022-2023
 SAMBHRAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
M. S. Palya, Bengaluru – 560097

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE

Certified that the Seminar work entitled “SEMANTIC WEB” carried out by Mr. AKASH RAJ K, USN
1ST19CS009, bonafide student of SAMBHRAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY in partial fulfilment
for the award of BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
of VISVESVARAYA TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY, Belagavi during the year 2022-2023. It is
certified that all corrections/suggestions indicated for Internal Assessment have been incorporated in the
Report deposited in the departmental library. The seminar report has been approved as it satisfies the
academic requirements in respect of Technical Seminar work prescribed for the said Degree.

Guide Co-ordinator HOD

Prof. Deepa S Bhat Prof. G.Rajaraman Dr.T.John Peter
Dept. of CSE Assistant Professor Dept. of CSE
SaIT,Bengaluru Dept. of CSE SaIT,Bengaluru
SaIT,Bengaluru
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The satisfaction and euphoria that accompany the successful completion of any task would be incomplete
without mentioning the people who made it possible, whose constant guidance and encouragement
crowned the efforts with success.

I would like to profoundly thank Management of Sambhram Institute of Technology for providing us such
a healthy environment for successful completion of seminar work.

I would like to express my thanks to our principal, Dr. H. G. Chandrakanth for his encouragement
that motivated me for successful completion of seminar work.

I am gratefully thankful to Dr. T. John Peter, Head of the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, SaIT, Bengaluru for providing necessary facilities and constant encouragement.

I would like to thank the seminar co-ordinators Prof. Vani B, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE and
Prof. G.Rajaraman, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE for their presence and continuous support
during Seminar Presentation work.

I am greatly indebted to my seminar guide Prof. Deepa S Bhat, Professor, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, SaIT, Bengaluru, for his meticulous guidance, valuable suggestions, support
and guidance that profoundly assisted me in completion of my seminar work.

I am also greatly indebted to all our teaching and non-teaching staff members of Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, for their guidance and valuable suggestions which they extend
me during the Seminar work.

Last but not the least, I would like to express my sincere thanks to my family and my friends for their
support and encouragement in successful completion of my Seminar work.

-AKASH RAJ K
-1ST19CS009
 ABSTRACT

Semantic web is a concept that enables better machine processing of information on

the web, by structuring documents written for the web in such a way that they become
understandable by machines. This can be used for creating more complex applications
(intelligent browsers, more advanced web agents), etc. Semantic modeling languages
like the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and topic maps employ XML syntax to
achieve this objective. New tools exploit cross domain vocabularies to automatically
extract and relate the meta information in a new context. Web Ontology languages like
DAML+OIL extend RDF with richer modeling primitives and a provide a technological
basis to enable the Semantic Web. The logic languages for Semantic Web are described
(which build on the of RDF and ontology languages). They, together with digital
signatures, enable a web of trust, which will have levels of trust for its resources and for
the rights of access, and will enable generating proofs, for the actions and resources on
the web.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER CONTENTS PAGE NO

NO
1 INTRODUCTION 7

2 BACKGROUND 8

3 THE WEB ONTOLOGY 10

LANGUAGE OWL

4 ONTOLOGY REASONING 13

5 ONTOLOGY APPLICATIONS 15

6 SEMETRIC AND 16

ACCESSIBILITY

7 FUTURE DIRECTIONS 18

CONCLUSIONS

REFERENCES
 LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE FIGURE NAME PAGE NO

NO
1 TREE OF PORPHYRY 8

2 EXAMPLE PIZZA ONTOLOGY 10

3 OWL CONSTRUCTORS 11
 SEMENTIC WEB

Chapter-1
1.Introduction
While phenomenally successful in terms of size and number of users, today’s World Wide Web is
fundamentally a relatively simple artefact. Web content consists mainly of distributed hypertext,
and is accessed via a combination of keyword based search and link navigation. This simplicity
has been one of the great strengths of the Web, and has been an important factor in its popularity
and growth: naive users are able to use it, and can even create their own content.
The explosion in both the range and quantity of Web content has, however, highlighted some
serious shortcomings in the hypertext paradigm. In the first place, the required content becomes
increasingly difficult to locate using the search and browse paradigm. Finding information about
people with very common names (or with famous namesakes) can, for example, be a frustrating
experience. More complex queries can be even more problematical: a query for “animals that use
sonar but are neither bats nor dolphins” may either return many irrelevant results related to bats
and dolphins (because the search engine failed to understand the negation), or may fail to return
many relevant results (because most relevant Web pages also mention bats or dolphins). More
complex tasks may be extremely difficult, or even impossible. Examples of such tasks include
locating information in data repositories that are not directly accessible to search engines (Volz et
al. 2004), or finding and using so-called web services (McIlraith et al. 2001).
If human users have difficulty accessing web content, the problem is even more severe for
automated processes. This is because web content is primarily intended for presentation to and
consumption by human users: HTML markup is mainly concerned with layout, size, colour and
other presentational issues. Moreover, web pages increasingly use images, often including active
links, to present information. Human users are able to interpret the significance of such features,
and thus understand the information being presented, but this may not be so easy for an automated
process or “software agent”.
The Semantic Web aims to overcome some of the above mentioned problems by making web
content more accessible to automated processes; the ultimate goal is to transform the existing web
into “...a set of connected applications ...forming a consistent logical web of data ...” (Berners-Lee
1998). This is to be achieved by adding semantic annotations to Web content, i.e., annotations
that describe the meaning of the content.
In the remainder of this chapter we will examine in a little more detail what semantic
annotations will look like, how they describe meaning, and how automated processes can exploit
such descriptions. We will also discuss the impact of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web
technology on accessibility.

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Chapter-2

2.Background
As we mentioned above, the key idea behind the semantic web is to explicate the meaning of web
content by adding semantic annotations. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that such
annotations take the form of XML style tags, we could imagine a fragment of a web page being
annotated as follows:
hWizardiHarry Potterh/Wizardi has a pet called hSnowyOwliHedwigh/SnowyOwli.
Taken in isolation, however, such annotations are of only limited value: the problem of
understanding the terms used in the text has simply been transformed into the problem of
understanding the terms used in the labels. A query for information about raptors, for example,
may not retrieve this text, even though owls are raptors. This is where ontologies come into play:
they provide a mechanism for introducing a vocabulary and giving precise meanings to the terms
in the vocabulary. A suitable ontology might, for example, introduce the term SnowyOwl, and
include the information that a SnowyOwl is a kind of Owl, and that an Owl is a kind of Raptor.
Moreover, if this information is represented in a way that is accessible to our query engine, then it
would be able to recognise that the above text is relevant to our query about raptors.
Ontology, in its original pholosophical sense, is a fundamental branch of metaphysics
focussing on the study of existence; its objective is to determine what entities and types of entities
actually exist, and thus to study the structure of the world. The study of ontology can be traced
back to the work of Plato and Aristotle, and from the very beginning included the development of
hierarchical categorisations of different kinds of entity and the features that distinguish them: the
well known “tree of Porphyry”, for example, identifies animals and plants as sub-categories of
living things distinguished by animals being sensitive, and plants being insensitive (see Figure 1).
In computer science, an ontology is usually taken to be a model of (some aspect of) the world;
it introduces vocabulary describing various aspects of the domain

Fig. 1. Tree of Porphyry.

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 SEMENTIC WEB

being modelled, and provides an explicit specification of the intended meaning of the vocabulary.
This specification often includes classification based information not unlike that in Porphyry’s
famous tree. For example, Figure 2 shows a screenshot of a Pizza ontology as displayed by the
Prot´eg´e ontology design tool (Knublauch et al. 2004). The ontology introduces various pizza
related vocabulary (some of which can be seen in the left hand panel), such as “NamedPizza” and
“RealItalianPizza”, and arranges it hierarchically: RealItalianPizza is, for example, a sub-category
of NamedPizza. The other panels display information about the currently selected category,
RealItalianPizza in this case, describing its meaning: a RealItalianPizza is a Pizza whose country
of origin is Italy; moreover, a RealItalianPizza always has a ThinAndCrispyBase. Ontologies can
be used to annotate and to organise data from the domain: if our data includes instances of
RealItalianPizza, then we can return them in response to a query for instances of NamedPizza.

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Chapter-3

3.The Web Ontology Language OWL

The architecture of the Web depends on agreed standards such as HTTP that allow information to
be shared and exchanged. A standard ontology language is, therefore, a prerequisite if ontologies
are to be used in order to share and exchange meaning. Recognising this fact, the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) set up a standardisation working group to develop such a langauge. The
result of this activity was the Web Ontology Language OWL ontology language standard (Patel-
Schneider et al. 2004). OWL exploited existing work on langauges such as OIL (Fensel et al.
2001) and DAML+OIL (Horrocks et al. 2002) and, like them, was based on a Descrip-

Fig. 2. Example pizza ontology.

tion Logic (DL). In the following we will briefly introduce DLs and OWL. For more complete
information the reader should consult The Description Logic Handbook (Baader et al. 2003), and
the OWL specification (Patel-Schneider et al. 2004).

3.1 Description Logic

Description logics (DLs) are a family of logic-based knowledge representation formalisms; they
are descendants of Semantic Networks (Woods 1985) and KL-ONE (Brachman and Schmolze
1985). These formalisms all adopt an object-oriented model, similar to the one used by Plato and
Aristotle, in which the domain is described in terms of individuals, concepts (usually called
classes in ontology languages), and roles (usually called relationships or properties in ontology
languages). Individuals, e.g., “Socrates” are the basic elements of the domain; concepts, e.g.,
“Human”, describe sets of individuals having similar characteristics; and roles, e.g., “hasPupil”
describe relationships between pairs of individuals, such as “Socrates hasPupil Plato”.
As well as atomic concept names such as Human, DLs also allow for concept descriptions to
be composed from atomic concepts and roles. Moreover, it is possible to assert that one concept

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(or concept description) is subsumed by (is a sub-concept of), or is exactly equivalent to, another.
This allows for easy extension of the vocabulary by introducing new names as abbreviations for
descriptions. For example, using standard DL notation, we might write:
HappyParent ≡ Parent u∀hasChild.(Intelligent t Athletic)
This introduces the concept name HappyParent, and asserts that its instances are just those
individuals that are instances of Parent, and all of whose children are instances of either intelligent
or athletic.
Another distinguishing feature of DLs is that they are logics, and so have a formal semantics.
DLs can, in fact, be seen as decidable subsets of first-order predicate logic, with individuals being
equivalent to constants, concepts to unary predicates and roles to binary predicates. As well as
giving a precise and unambiguous meaning to descriptions of the domain, this also allows for the
development of reasoning algorithms that can be used to answer complex questions about the
domain. An important aspect of DL research has been the design of such algorithms, and their
implementation in (highly optimised) reasoning systems that can be used by applications to help
them “understand” the knowledge captured in a DL based ontology. We will return to this point in
Section 4.
A given DL is characterised by the set of constructors provided for building concept
descriptions. These typically include at least intersection (u), union (t) and complement (¬), as
well as restricted forms of existential (∃) and universal (∀) quantification, which in OWL are
called, respectively, someValuesFrom and allValuesFrom restrictions. OWL is based on a very
expressive DL called SHOIN that also provides cardinality restrictions (>, 6) and enumerated
classes (called oneOf in OWL) (Horrocks et al. 2003, Horrocks and Sattler 2005). Cardinality
restrictions allow, e.g., for the description of a concept such as people who have at least two
children, while enumerated classes allow for classes to be described by simply enumerating their
instances, e.g.,:
EUcountries ≡ {Austria,...,UK}
SHOIN also provides for transitive roles, allowing us to state, e.g., that if x has an ancestor y and y
had an ancestor z, then z is also an ancestor of x, and for inverse roles, allowing us to state, e.g.,
that if z is an ancestor of x, then x is also an descendent of z. The constructors provided by OWL,
and the equivalent DL syntax, are summarised in Figure 3.
Construct D Example
or L
Sy
nt
ax
intersectio C1 u Human u
nOf ... u Male
Cn
unionOf C1 t Doctor t
... t Lawyer
Cn
compleme ¬C ¬Male
ntOf
oneOf {x1 . {john,mar
..xn} y}

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 SEMENTIC WEB

allValuesF ∀P.C ∀hasChild.

rom Doctor
someValu ∃r.C ∃hasChild.
esFrom Lawyer
hasValue ∃r. ∃citizenOf
{x} .{USA}
minCardin (> n (> 2
ality r) hasChild)
maxCardi (6 n (6 1
nality r) r− hasChild)
inverseOf hasChild−
Fig. 3. OWL constructors
In DLs it is usual to separate the set of statements that establish the vocabulary to be used in
describing the domain (what we might think of as the schema) from the set of statements that
describe some particular situation that instantiates the schema (what we might think of as data);
the former is called the TBox (Terminology Box), and the latter the ABox (Assertion Box). An
OWL ontology is simply equivalent to a set of SHOIN TBox and ABox statements. This mixing of
schema and data is quite unusual (in fact ontologies are usually thought of as consisting only of
the schema part), but does not affect the meaning—from a logical perspective, SHOIN KBs and
OWL ontologies are just sets of axioms.
The main difference between OWL and SHOIN is that OWL ontologies use an RDF based
syntax intended to facilitate its use in the context of the Semantic Web. This syntax is rather
verbose, and not well suited for presentation to human beings. E.g., the description of
HappyParent given above would be written in OWL’s RDF syntax as follows:
<owl:Class>
<owl:intersectionOf rdf:parseType=" collection">
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Parent"/>
<owl:Restriction>
<owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#hasChild"/>
<owl:allValuesFrom>
<owl:unionOf rdf:parseType=" collection">
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Intelligent"/>
<owl:Class rdf:about="#Athletic"/>
</owl:unionOf>
</owl:allValuesFrom>
</owl:Restriction>
</owl:intersectionOf>
</owl:Class>

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Chapter-4

4. Ontology Reasoning
We mentioned in Section 3.1 that the design and implementation of reasoning systems is an
important aspect of DL research. The availability of such reasoning systems was one of the
motivations for basing OWL on a DL. This is because reasoning is essential in supporting both
the design of high quality ontologies, and the deployment of ontologies in applications.

4.1 Reasoning at design time

Ontologies may be very large and complex: the well known Snomed clinical terms ontology
includes, for example, more than 200,000 class names (Spackman 2000). Building and
maintaining such ontologies is very costly and time consuming, and providing tools and services
to support this “ontology engineering” process is of crucial importance to both the cost and the
quality of the resulting ontology. State of the art ontology development tools, such as SWOOP
(Kalyanpur et al. 2005a) and Prot´eg´e (Knublauch et al. 2004), therefore use a DL reasoner, such
as FaCT++ (Tsarkov and Horrocks 2006), Racer (Haarslev and M¨oller 2001) or Pellet (Sirin et
al. 2005), to provide feedback to the user about the logical implications of their design. This
typically includes (at least) warnings about inconsistencies and redundancies.
An inconsistent (sometimes called unsatisfiable) class is one whose description is “over-
constrained”, with the result that it can never have any instances. This is typically an unintended
feature of the design—why introduce a name for a class that can never have any instances—and
may be due to subtle interactions between descriptions. The ability to detect such classes and
bring them to the attention of the ontology engineer is, therefore, a very useful feature.
It is also possible that the descriptions in the ontology mean that two classes necessarily have
exactly the same set of instances, i.e., that they are alternative names for the same class. This may
be desirable in some situations, e.g., to capture the fact that “Myocardial infarction” and “Heart
attack” mean the same thing. It could, however, also be the inadvertent result of interactions
between descriptions, and so it is also useful to be able to alert users to the presence of such
“synonyms”.
In addition to checking for inconsistencies and synonyms, ontology development tools usually
also check for implicit subsumption relationships, and amend the class hierarchy accordingly.
This is also a very useful design aid: it allows the ontology developer to focus on class
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descriptions, leaving the computation of the class hierarchy to the reasoner, and it can also be
used by the developer to check if the hierarchy induced by the class descriptions is consistent with
their intuition.
Recent work has also shown how reasoning can be used to support modular design (Cuenca
Grau et al. 2007b) and module extraction (Cuenca Grau et al. 2007a), important techniques for
working with large ontologies. When developing a large ontology such as SNOMED, it is useful
if not essential to divide the ontology into modules, e.g., to facilitate parallel work by a team of
ontology developers. Reasoning techniques can be used to alert the developers to unanticipated
and/or undesirable interactions between the various modules. Similarly, it may be desirable to
extract from a large ontology a smaller module containing all the information relevant to some
subset of the domain, e.g., heart disease—the resulting small(er) ontology will be easier for
humans to understand and easier for applications to use. Reasoning can be used to compute a
module that is as small as possible while still containing all the necessary information.
Finally, in order to maximise the benefit of all these services, a modern system should also be
able to explain its inferences: without this facility, users may find it difficult to repair errors in the
ontology and may even start to doubt the correctness of the reasoning system. Explanation
typically involves computing a (hopefully small) subset of the ontology that still entails the
inference in question, and if necessary presenting the user with a chain of reasoning steps
(Kalyanpur et al. 2005b).

4.2 Reasoning in deployment

Reasoning is also important when ontologies are deployed in applications—it is needed, e.g., in
order to answer structural queries about the domain and to retrieve data. If we assume, for
example, an ontology that includes the above description of HappyParent, and we know that John
is a HappyParent, that John has a child Mary (i.e., John hasChild Mary), and that Mary is not
Athletic, then we would like to be able to infer that Mary is Intelligent.
The above example may seem quite trivial, but it is easy to imagine that, with large ontologies,
query answering may be a very complex task. The use of DL reasoners allows OWL ontology
applications to answer complex queries, and to provide guarantees about the correctness of the
result. This is particularly important if ontology based systems are to be used as components in
larger applications, such as the Semantic Web, where the correct functioning of automated
processes may depend on their being able to (correctly) answer such queries.

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Chapter-5

5.Ontology Applications
The availability of tools and reasoning systems such as those mentioned in Section 4 has
contributed to the increasingly widespread use of OWL, not only in the Semantic Web per se, but
as a popular language for ontology development in fields as diverse as biology (Sidhu et al. 2005),
medicine (Golbreich et al. 2006), geography (Goodwin 2005), geology (SWEET), astronomy
(Derriere et al. 2006), agriculture (Soergel et al. 2004) and defence (Lacy et al. 2005).
Applications of OWL are particularly prevalent in the life sciences where it has been used by the
developers of several large biomedical ontologies, including the Biological Pathways Exchange
(BioPAX) ontology (Ruttenberg et al. 2005), the GALEN ontology (Rector and Rogers 2006), the
Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) (Golbreich et al. 2006), and the National Cancer Institute
thesaurus (Hartel et al. 2005).
The importance of reasoning support in such applications was highlighted in (Kershenbaum et
al. 2006), which describes a project in which the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED), a large
ontology (100,210 classes and 261 properties) that is used at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical
Center, was converted into OWL, and checked using an OWL reasoner. This check revealed
“systematic modelling errors”, and a significant number of missed subClass relationships which,
if not corrected, “could have cost the hospital many missing results in various decision support
and infection control systems that routinely use MED to screen patients”.

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Chapter-6

6.Semantics and Accessibility

The development of Semantic Web languages and technology was primarily driven by a desire to
overcome the problems encountered by “software agents” in using information available on the
web. However, the chief characteristic of the Semantic Web approach, namely the annotation of
resources with machine readable descriptions also offers a promise for accessibility. Principled
separation of content from presentational information (e.g. through the use of CSS) helps to
alleviate some problems – for example ensuring that presentational aspects are not used to convey
additional meaning. Rich, semantic annotations of content can push this further – explicitly
publishing content in machine readable forms opens up the possibilities for end user applications
to transform the annotated information and present it to a user in an appropriate fashion.
We can identify at least three areas where accessibility issues relate to Semantic Web. First of
all, Semantic Web end-user applications targeted at consumers must be sympathetic to the needs
of users. There are also an increasing number of tools aimed at producers of Semantic
information – again, we must be careful in the design and execution of these applications. Finally,
there is the possibility of using Semantic Web technologies and approaches in supporting access
to content. We briefly discuss each of these issues.

6.1 End User Applications

A number of applications (for example Magpie (Dzbor et al. 2003) or COHSE (Carr et al. 2001,
Yesilada et al. 2006)) provide what we might call Semantic Web Browsers. These provide
enhanced navigational possibilities for users, based on additional semantic information which is
either embedded in pages, added through annotations, or gleaned at run time through the use of
natural language processing techniques. While browsing a web resource, the applications give
additional context or links to related resources. These applications tend to use client side
processing (for example relying on dynamic HTML or AJAX-style interactions) in order to
provide an enhanced user experience. Clearly this raises questions as to the accessibility of the
presentations generated. Similarly, applications and tools that support browsing of RDF
repositories tend to be graphical in nature. To date, the issue of accessibility has not been
explicitly tackled within such applications.

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6.2 Support Tools

Tools are also available to support producers of semantic information. As discussed in Section
3.1, the normative presentation syntax for OWL (XML/RDF) is a rather verbose format which is
not particularly human readable. Tooling is thus required to support editing and manipulation of
ontologies. In particular, ontology editors such as Prot´eg´e and SWOOP allow the development,
construction and maintenance of ontologies. However, these tools are largely graphical in nature,
and present potential difficulties for visually impaired users. As with end-user tools, little
exploration of accessible ontology development interfaces has been done to date – ontology
editors are still perhaps something of a niche-market. Most modern ontology development tools
have been developed using Java, so the possibility exists for enhancement of the interfaces (for
example through the Java Accessibility API), but additional care is likely to be required in the
interface design.

6.3Annotation for Accessibility

Finally, we turn our attention to the use of Semantic Web technology to support better access to
information. The Semantic Web is built on the notation of annotation or decoration of resources
with additional information describing the content or function of those resources. This explicit
representations of information allows applications or software agents to perform actions on behalf
of users.
Improving sharing and interoperability between applications is seen as a key benefit of the use
of ontologies. EARL (Abou-Zahra 2005) uses vocabularies in order to facilitate the exchange of
information between tools.
Although most examples of semantic web applications focus on tasks such as searching or
information integration, semantic annotation has been applied in order to support Web content
transcoding. Annotations for Web content transcoding aim to provide better support either for
audio rendering, and thus for visually impaired users, or for visual rendering in small screen
devices.
Proxy-based systems to transcode Web pages based on external annotations for visually
impaired users have been proposed (Takagi and Asakawa 2000, Asakawa and Takagi 2000). The
main focus is on extracting visually fragmented groupings, their roles and importance. There is no
particular attempt to provide a deep understanding or analysis of the page. Approaches such as
SWAP (Seeman 2004) use semantic annotations to support accessibility and device independence.
The SeEBrowser (Kouroupetroglou et al. 2006) consumes annotations in order to support visually
impaired users’ navigation around pages. Interestingly, the ontology editor reported in
(Kouroupetroglou et al. 2006) is very much a visual tool (as discussed above).
DANTE (Yesilada et al. 2004) used an ontology known as WAfA to provide terms relating to
mobility of visually impaired users. Annotations made on pages describe the roles that particular
elements may play. These annotations can then drive a transformation process. The use of an
ontology helps to guarantee a consistency across annotations and their interpretation. DANTE
relies on the annotation of individual pages, however, which can be costly.
An alternative approach is adopted by SADIe (Harper and Bechhofer 2005, Bechhofer et al.
2006), which relies on annotations of style sheet information attached to pages. The rationale
behind SADIe’s approach is that the classes that appear in Cascading Style Sheet definitions often
have some implicit semantics associated with them. For example, a CSS class menu may be used
to define the presentational attributes associated with a menu appearing on a page. Such an object
is likely to be important in supporting navigation around a site, and so should be given a
prominent rendering in a transcoded page. The ontology provides an abstraction over the roles of

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elements appearing in pages, and allows applications to apply general transformations over
different sites. The structure of the ontology also allows the description of general rules – e.g.
menu items should be promoted to a prominent position – along with specialisations of those
items – e.g. items in a navigation bar are menu items.
These annotations differ slightly from mainstream Semantic Web annotation approaches
(Handschuh and Staab 2003) which tend to focus on annotation of content rather than structure.
This is still, however, an example of the explicit exposure of information in machine readable
forms. The approach of treating annotations as first class citizens, separate from the resources
they annotate, is of benefit here, however, allowing third parties potential opportunities to
improve access to resources where the original provider will not, or can not alter existing content.

Chapter-7

7.Future Directions

As we have seen in Section 5, OWL is already being successfully used in many applications. This
success brings with it, however, many challenges for the future development of both the OWL
language and OWL tool support. Central to these is the familiar tension between the requirements
for advanced features, in particular increased expressive power, and raw performance, in
particular the ability to deal with very large ontologies and data sets.
Use of OWL in the life sciences domain has brought to the fore examples of both of the above
mentioned requirements. On the one hand, ontologies describing complex systems in medicine
and biology often require expressive power beyond what is currently supported in OWL. Two
particular features that are very often requested are the ability to “qualify” cardinality constraints,
e.g., to describe the hand as having four parts that are fingers and one part that is a thumb, and
the ability to have some characteristics be transferred across transitive part-whole relations, e.g.,
to capture the fact that a disease affecting a part of an organ affects the organ as a whole. The
former feature (so called qualified cardinality restrictions) has long been well understood, and has
been available for some time in DL reasoners; the latter feature is now also well understood,
thanks to recent theoretical work in the DL community (Horrocks and Sattler 2004, Horrocks et
al. 2006), and has recently been implemented in DL reasoners.
This happy coincidence of user requirements and extensions in the underlying DLs and
reasoning systems has led to a proposal to extend OWL with these and other useful features that
have been requested by users, for which effective reasoning algorithms are now available, and
that OWL tool developers are willing to support. In addition to those mentioned above, the new
features include extra syntactic sugar, extended datatype support, simple metamodelling, and
extended annotations. The extended language, called OWL 1.1, is now a W3C member
submission1, and is already supported by tools such as Swoop, Prot´eg´e and TopBraid Composer.

1 http://www.w3.org/Submission/2006/10/
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As well as increased expressive power, applications may also bring with them requirements for
scalability that are a challenge to current systems. This may include the ability to reason with very
large ontologies, perhaps containing 10s or even 100s of thousands of classes, and the ability to
use an ontology with very large data sets, perhaps containing 10s or even 100s of millions of
individuals—in fact data sets much larger than this will certainly be a requirement in some
applications. Researchers are rising to these challenges by developing new reasoning systems
such as the OWL Instance Store (Bechhofer et al. 2005), that uses a combination of DL reasoning
and relational database systems to deal with large volumes of instance data, HermiT 2, that uses a
hypertableau based technique to deal more effectively with large and complex ontologies, and
Kaon2 (Hustadt et al. 2004), that reduces OWL ontologies to disjunctive datalog programs, and
uses deductive database techniques to enable it to deal with very large data sets.

Conclusions
As we have seen, the goal of Semantic Web research is to transform the Web from a linked
document repository into a distributed knowledge base and application platform, thus allowing
the vast range of available information and services to be more effectively exploited. As a first
step in this transformation, languages such as OWL have been developed; these languages are
designed to capture the knowledge that will enable applications to better understand Web
accessible resources, and to use them more intelligently. As we have seen in Section 6, the
annotation of resources with machine readable descriptions also offers a promise for accessibility.
Although fully realising the Semantic Web still seems some way off, OWL has already been
very successful, and has rapidly become a de facto standard for ontology development in fields as
diverse as geography, geology, astronomy, agriculture, defence and the life sciences. An important
factor in this success has been the availability of sophisticated tools with built in reasoning
support.
The use of OWL in large scale applications has brought with it new challenges, both with
respect to expressive power and scalability, but recent research has also shown how the OWL
language and OWL tools can be extended and adapted to meet these challenges.

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