THE

SEMANTIC
WEB
 ABSTRACT
The traditional view of information systems as tailor-made, cost-intensive database
applications is changing rapidly. The change is fueled partly by a maturing software
industry, which is making greater use of off-the-shelf generic components and standard
software solutions, and partly by the onslaught of the information revolution. In turn, this
change has resulted in a new set of demands for information services that are homogeneous
in their presentation and interaction patterns, open in their software architecture, and global
in their scope. The demands have come mostly from application domains such as e-
commerce and banking, manufacturing (including the software industry itself), training,
education, and environmental management, to mention just a few. Future information
systems will have to support smooth interaction with a large variety of independent
multivendor data sources and legacy applications, running on heterogeneous platforms and
distributed information networks. Metadata will play a crucial role in describing the
contents of such data sources and in facilitating their integration. All of these feats are not
achievable using the conventional WWW web, hence the need for a more sophisticated
and dynamic architecture which supports communication with apps running on different
platforms which led to the development of the semantic web. This seminar is aimed at
discussing the history, area of application, benefits, challenges and the future of semantic
web.
Keywords: Semantic web, metadata, software applications, www.
 TABLE OF CONTENT
Introduction
What is semantic web
Origin of semantic web
Components of the semantic web
Semantic web architecture
How the semantic web works
Application of the semantic web
Benefits of the semantic web in the world today
Future of the semantic web
Conclusion
Recommendation
References
 INTRODUCTION
World Wide Web is the first source of information for everyone viz., students,
research scholars, faculty, practitioners, Information Officers, etc. The Information
Resources on the web are in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and the
information in them is not machine readable. People search for the Information on a
particular topic via a web portal by typing in the key words. The retrieved result
consists of only few relevant ones. The search is performed by using statistical
methods such as most occurrences of words, co-occurrence of words, etc. The
keyword index is completely incapable of presenting relational information between
concepts and the keyword search displays only the matching links. The information
professionals are advocating for more advanced technology search engines which
have deductive reasoning like human beings. To achieve such a system the metadata
and ontologies have to be developed and are embedded into the web pages. (Yadagiri
& Ramesh, 2022). The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal
that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that
machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this
has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human
consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well-defined meanings
for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the
web. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the
Finnish word for "car", to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD
and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human
direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The
Semantic Web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that
they can perform more of the tedious works involved in finding, sharing and
combining information on the web. For example, a computer might be instructed to
list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at
shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings. Today, this
task requires search engines that are individually tailored to every website being
searched. The semantic web provides a common standard (RDF) for websites to
publish the relevant information in a more readily machine-processable and integral
form. (Tapas, 2023).

WHAT IS SEMANTIC WEB?

The word ‘Semantics’ has been derived from Greek word ‘sēmantik á’ (neuter plural
of sēmantikós) which means the study of meaning. The study focuses on the relation
between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand
for, their denotation. Linguistic semantics deals with the study of meaning that is
used to understand human expression through language. Other forms of semantics
include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. The
terms semantics, metadata and ontologies are used synonymously to refer to
Semantic Web. (Yadagiri & Ramesh, 2022)
The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the
semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for
the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the
Web content. It derives from W3C director Tim Berners -Lee vision of the Web as
a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange. 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” (Tapas, 2023)
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 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. The semantic
web is a vision of information that can be readily interpreted by machines, so
machines can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and
acting upon information on the web. Semantic web technology made some of the
following achievable:
• Retrieving large amounts of textual data quickly.
• Allowing users to add annotations so that a reasoning capability exists.
• Making text retrieval more specific.
• Allowing conclusions to be drawn by data on the Web and across
organizations. (Ahmed, 2015)

ORIGIN OF SEMANTIC WEB:

Many cognitive scientists have worked earlier on how to structure the knowledge
semantically and enable the automated agents to access the web more intelligently
and perform the work of the users on their behalf. Descriptive technologies such as
XML, RDF, and OWL have been developed to address the limitations in using
HTML. XML (Extensible Markup Language) provides a method for transmitting
structured documents. It does not impose any semantic constraints or meaning on
the data it carries. RDF (Resource Descriptive Framework) is a simple framework /
data model to refer the content in the object. RDF is often represented in XML
format. RSS is an RDF object. The concept of Semantic Web was first coined by
Tim Berners-Lee, who had also developed Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML),
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and
World Wide Web (WWW). He visualized Semantic Web as a platform where the
intelligent software agents will analyze a particular given situation and present with
the best possible alternatives to the users. In his book “Scientific American”, May
2001, Tim Berners-Lee has shown how the Semantic Web would work technically
and explained about ontologies and as well as their importance in constructing the
Semantic Web Companion Web site. He said that Semantic Web will act as an
integrator across different applications and content in publishing, blogging and other
areas, information applications and systems.

COMPONENTS OF THE 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 Markup Language (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 description of concepts, terms and
relationships within a given knowledge domain, Logic, Proof and Trust.

Source: W3C
Fig 1: The semantic web stack.
The major component which are URI, XML and RDF are discussed below.

Identifiers (Uniform Resource Identifier URI): To identify items on the Web, we

use identifiers. Because we use a uniform system of identifiers, and because each
item identified is considered a "resource," we call these identifiers "Uniform
Resource Identifiers" or URIs for short. We can give a URI to anything, and anything
that has a URI can be said to be "on the Web": you, the book you bought last week,
the fly that keeps buzzing in your ear and anything else you can think of -- they all
can have a URI. One can classify URIs as locators (URLs), or as names (URNs), or
as both. A Uniform Resource Name (URN) functions like a person's name, while a
Uniform Resource Locator (URL) resembles that person's street address. In other
words: the URN defines an item's identity, while the URL provides a method for
finding it.
Documents (Extensible Markup Language XML): XML was designed to be a
simple way to send documents across the Web. It allows anyone to design their own
document format and then write a document in that format. These document for mats
can include markup to enhance the meaning of the document's content. This markup
is "machine-readable," that is, programs can read and understand it. By including
machine-readable meaning in our documents, we make them much more powerful.
Consider a simple example: If a document contains certain words that are marked
as "emphasized," the way those words are rendered can be adapted to the context. A
Web browser might simply display them in italics, whereas a voice browser (which
reads Web pages aloud) might indicate the emphasis by changing the tone or the
volume of its voice.
Statements Resource Description Framework (RDF): The most fundamental
building block is Resource Description Framework (RDF), a format for defining
information on the web. RDF is a markup language for describing information and
resources on the web. Putting information into RDF files, makes it possible for
computer programs ("web spiders") to search, discover, pick up, collect, analyze and
process information from the web. The Semantic Web uses RDF to describe web
resources. RDF provides a model for data, and a syntax so that independent parties
can exchange and use it. It is designed to be read and understood by computers. It is
not designed for being displayed to people. (Tapas, 2023)

THE SEMANTIC WEB ARCHITECTURE

A key aspect of the traditional web is the fact that its content is distributed, both in
location and in ownership: web pages that link to each other often live on different
web servers, and these servers are in different physical locations and owned by
different parties. A crucial contributor to the growth of the web is the fact that
“anybody can say anything about anything,” or more precisely: anybody can refer
to anybody’s web page without having to negotiate first about permissions or inquire
about the right address or identifier to use. A similar mechanism is at work in the
Semantic Web, a first party can publish a dataset on the web (left side of the
diagram), a second party can independently publish a vocabulary of terms (right side
of the diagram), and a third party may decide to annotate the object of the first party
with a term published by the second party, without asking for permission from either
of them, and in fact without either of these two having to even know about it. It is
this decoupling that is the essence of the weblike nature of the Semantic Web. The
semantic web was built on the following design principles:
1. Make structured and semi-structured data available in standardized formats on
the web;
2. Make not just the datasets, but also the individual data-elements and their relations
accessible on the web;
3. Describe the intended semantics of such data in a formalism, so that this intended
semantics can be processed by machines. (Grigoris, Paul, & Frank, 2012)
HOW THE SEMANTIC WEB WORKS:
We have seen how knowledge is represented using RDF. Once information is
represented in RDF, we need to be able to access relevant parts of it both for
reasoning and developing applications. A query language, called SPARQL, for
allows us select, extract, and otherwise easily get a hold of particular sections of
knowledge expressed in RDF. SPARQL is specifically designed for RDF, and is
tailored to and relies upon the various technologies underlying the web. If you are
familiar with database query languages like SQL, you will notice many similarities.
(Grigoris, Paul, & Frank, 2012). SPARQL is a protocol and query language for
semantic web data sources. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse
data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via
middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional
graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also
supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The
results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.
(World_Wide_Web_Consortium, 2023)
To perform a SPARQL query, one needs software to execute the query. The most
common software that does this is called a triple store. Essentially, a triple store is a
database for RDF. You can download a number of triple stores online. Within the
specifications for SPARQL a triple store is referred to as a Graph Store. Before one
can query a triple store, it needs to be populated with RDF. Most triple stores provide
bulk upload options. There is also a mechanism called SPARQL Update, which
provides a series of options for inserting and loading as well as deleting RDF into a
triple store. SPARQL Update will be discussed later in the chapter. Once data is
loaded into a triple store, it can be queried by sending SPARQL queries using the
SPARQL protocol. Each triple store provides what is termed an endpoint, where
SPARQL queries can be submitted. An important point is that clients send queries
to an endpoint using the HTTP protocol. Indeed, you can issue a SPARQL query to
an endpoint by entering it into your browser’s URL bar! However, we suggest
obtaining a client designed specifically for SPARQL. Again, there are a number of
them available on-line.
Because SPARQL uses standard web technologies, you will find numerous
SPARQL endpoints on the web. These endpoints provide access to large amounts of
data. For example, dbpedia.org/sparql provides a query endpoint to query over an
RDF representation of Wikipedia. You’ll find a complete list of SPARQL endpoints
at CKAN.org. (Grigoris, Paul, & Frank, 2012)

APPLICATION OF THE SEMANTIC WEB

Recent years have seen a dramatic acceleration in the uptake of Semantic Web
technologies, whereas the first years of Semantic Web applications (2000–2007)
were mostly dominated by industrial or academic prototypes that did not go into full
production. More recent years (since 2008) have seen full-scale production systems
in a variety of sectors in business and commerce that have used Semantic Web
technologies in an essential manner. Some real-life applications of the semantic web
are further discussed:
E-Commerce:
E-commerce, and in particular Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce, has been
one of the main drivers behind the rapid adoption of the World Wide Web in
everyday live. It is now commonplace to see URLs listed on storefronts and goods
vehicles. Taking the UK as an example, the B2C market has grown from £87 million
in April 2000 to £68.4 billion by the end of 2009, a thousand-fold increase over a
single decade. GoodRelations is a vivid example of the use of semantic web in E-
Commerce. GoodRelations is an OWL-compliant ontology that describes the
domain of electronic commerce. It can be used to express an offering of a product,
to specify a price, to describe a business, and the like. The RDFa syntax for
GoodRelations allows this information to be embedded into existing web pages so
that they can be processed by other computers. The primary benefit of
GoodRelations and the main driver behind its rapidly increasing adoption is how it
improves search.
Music:
The BBC Music Beta project is an effort by the BBC to build semantically linked
and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC
radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and
interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections
between artists that they may have not known existed. Previously, writers at the BBC
would have to write (and keep up to date) interesting and relevant content on every
single artist page they published. Instead, on the Music Beta project, the BBC is
pulling in information from external sites such as MusicBrainz and Wikipedia and
aggregating this information to build their web pages. For this purpose, the BBC has
adopted the RDF standard, and has mapped its own data schema with that published
by MusicBrainz to utilize the unique identifiers that MusicBrainz provides.

Sports:
Besides broadcasting radio and television programs, the BBC puts substantial effort
into building websites to provide news and media information. For their website for
the 2010 World Cup soccer event, the BBC deployed semantic technologies in order
to achieve more automatic content publishing, a higher number of pages manageable
with a lower headcount, semantic navigation, and personalization. The BBC has
developed small ontologies to capture the domain of soccer, including domain-
specific notions concerning soccer teams and tournaments, as well as very generic
notions for events and geographic locations, using well-known ontologies such
as FOAF (Friend of A Friend) and GeoNames.
Government Data:
Some of the early large-scale adoption of Semantic Web technologies in the world
was a result of the Obama administration’s drive towards more transparency of
government. Publishing data sources that had traditionally been locked up inside
governmental institutions and not available to the public was seen as a crucial step
toward more transparent government, and Semantic Web technologies were seen as
a key technology for publishing these data.

BENEFITS OF THE SEMANTIC WEB IN THE WORLD TODAY

The main power of Semantic Web languages is that anyone can create one, simply
by publishing some RDF that describes a set of URIs, what they do, and how they
should be used. We have already seen that RDF Schema and DAML are very
powerful languages for creating languages. Because we use URIs for each of the
terms in our languages, we can publish the languages easily without fear that they
might get misinterpreted or stolen, and with the knowledge that anyone in the world
that has a generic RDF processor can use them. The following are the benefits of the
semantic web in our world today:
• Information is captured in a language agnostic format.
• A central repository for knowledge is created.
• More precise, relevant information is captured.
• Processes and procedures are mapped to data sources.
• One collective view of knowledge across enterprise applications is created.
As a result:
• Point-to-point integration becomes obsolete.
• Application integration is easy and efficient.
• Superfluous data decreases.
• Knowledge across applications becomes consistent.
• Upgrades and maintenance are simplified. (Ahmed, 2015)
FUTURE OF THE SEMANTIC WEB
Undoubtedly, the grand goal of the Semantic Web field – be it the creation of The
Semantic Web as an artifact, or providing solutions for data sharing, discovery,
integration and reuse which make it completely easy and painless – has not been
fully achieved. The field of semantic web is constantly expanding as the need to
integrate new solutions as posed by the present day needs in every sector, in the
coming years, if researches in the improvement of the semantic web technology are
not stopped, the Internet of Things (IoT) will sure be achieved for any area of life as
need be.
 CONCLUSION:
The Semantic Web field has produced a wealth of knowledge regarding efficient
data management for data sharing, discovery, integration and reuse. The
contributions of the field are best understood by means of the applications they have
given rise to. It is worthy of note that the semantic web has revolutionized the view
of information representation and sharing on the web and this is not likely to stop
but rather increase and provide more solutions even for the generation to come.
 RECOMMENDATION:
From the discussion above, the field of semantic web is rapidly growing and the
following recommendation are proposed to ensure the steady development in this
field:
• Research should be furthered in findings more areas of application of the
semantic web.
• Software companies and regulatory bodies in charge of the internet
framework should make libraries and frameworks open source for
contributions from individuals who can advance the field.
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Authority, 3-4.

Grigoris, A., Paul, G., & Frank, v. H. (2012). A semantic web primer. In A
semantic web primer (pp. 40-42). London: The MIT press, Cambridge.

Tapas, K. M. (2023). Semantic Web. Kharagpur: Department of Computer Science

and Engineering,Indian Institute of Technology,Kharagpur.

W3C. (2023, May 14). Retrieved from www.w3c.org: www.w3c.org

World_Wide_Web_Consortium. (2023, May 14). www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-

query/. Retrieved from www.w3.org: www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

Yadagiri, N., & Ramesh, p. (2022). Semantic web and libraries: An overview. 1-2.