Chapter 1

The Semantic Web Vision

1 Chapter 1 A Semantic Web Primer

 Lecture Outline

1. Today’s Web
2. The Semantic Web Impact
3. Semantic Web Technologies
4. A Layered Approach

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 Today’s Web

 Most of today’s Web content is suitable for human

consumption
– Even Web content that is generated automatically from
databases is usually presented without the original
structural information found in databases
 Typical Web uses today people’s
– seeking and making use of information, searching for and
getting in touch with other people, reviewing catalogs of
online stores and ordering products by filling out forms

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 Keyword-Based Search Engines

 Current Web activities are not particularly

well supported by software tools
– Except for keyword-based search engines (e.g.
Google, AltaVista, Yahoo)
 The Web would not have been the huge
success it was, were it not for search
engines

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 Problems of Keyword-Based
Search Engines

Results are highly sensitive to vocabulary

Results are single Web pages
Human involvement is necessary to interpret
and combine results
Results of Web searches are not readily
accessible by other software tools

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 The Semantic Web Approach

 Represent Web content in a form that is

more easily machine-processable.
 Use intelligent techniques to take advantage
of these representations.
 The Semantic Web will gradually evolve out
of the existing Web, it is not a competition to
the current WWW

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 Lecture Outline

1. Today’s Web
2. The Semantic Web Impact
3. Semantic Web Technologies
4. A Layered Approach

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 The Semantic Web Impact –
Knowledge Management

 Knowledge management concerns itself with

acquiring, accessing, and maintaining knowledge
within an organization
 Key activity of large businesses: internal knowledge
as an intellectual asset
 It is particularly important for international,
geographically dispersed organizations
 Most information is currently available in a weakly
structured form (e.g. text, audio, video)

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 Limitations of Current Knowledge
Management Technologies

 Searching information
– Keyword-based search engines
 Extracting information
– human involvement necessary for browsing, retrieving,
interpreting, combining
 Maintaining information
– inconsistencies in terminology, outdated information.
 Viewing information
– Impossible to define views on Web knowledge

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 Semantic Web Enabled Knowledge
Management

 Knowledge will be organized in conceptual spaces

according to its meaning.
 Automated tools for maintenance and knowledge
discovery
 Semantic query answering
 Query answering over several documents
 Defining who may view certain parts of information
(even parts of documents) will be possible.

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 The Semantic Web Impact –
B2C Electronic Commmerce

 A typical scenario: user visits one or several

online shops, browses their offers, selects
and orders products.
 Ideally humans would visit all, or all major
online stores; but too time consuming
 Shopbots are a useful tool

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 Limitations of Shopbots

 They rely on wrappers: extensive

programming required
 Wrappers need to be reprogrammed when
an online store changes its outfit
 Wrappers extract information based on
textual analysis
– Error-prone
– Limited information extracted

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 Semantic Web Enabled B2C
Electronic Commerce

 Software agents that can interpret the

product information and the terms of service.
– Pricing and product information, delivery and
privacy policies will be interpreted and compared
to the user requirements.
 Information about the reputation of shops
 Sophisticated shopping agents will be able to
conduct automated negotiations

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 Semantic Web Enabled B2B Electronic
Commerce

 Businesses enter partnerships without much

overhead
 Differences in terminology will be resolved using
standard abstract domain models
 Data will be interchanged using translation services.
 Auctioning, negotiations, and drafting contracts will
be carried out automatically (or semi-automatically)
by software agents

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 Wikis

 Collections of web pages that allow users to

add content via a browser interface
 Wiki systems allow for collaborative
knowledge
 Users are free to add and change
information without ownership of content,
access restrictions, or rigid workflows

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 Some Uses of Wikis

 Development of bodies of knowledge in a

community effort, with contributions from a
wide range of users (e.g. Wikipedia)
 Knowledge management of an activity or a
project (e.g. brainstorming and exchanging
ideas, coordinating activities, exchanging
records of meetings)

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 Semantic Web Enabled Wikis

 The inherent structure of a wiki, given by the linking

between pages, gets accessible to machines beyond
mere navigation
 Structured text and untyped hyperlinks are enriched
by semantic annotations referring to an underlying
model of the knowledge captured by the wiki
− e.g. a hyperlink from Knossos to Heraklion could be annotated with
information is located in. This information could then be used for
context-specific presentations of pages, advanced querying, and
consistency verification

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 Lecture Outline

1. Today’s Web
2. The Semantic Web Impact
3. Semantic Web Technologies
4. A Layered Approach

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 Semantic Web Technologies

 Explicit Metadata
 Ontologies
 Logic and Inference
 Agents

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 On HTML

 Web content is currently formatted for human

readers rather than programs
 HTML is the predominant language in which
Web pages are written (directly or using
tools)

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 An HTML Example
<h1>Agilitas Physiotherapy Centre</h1>
Welcome to the home page of the Agilitas Physiotherapy Centre. Do
you feel pain? Have you had an injury? Let our staff Lisa Davenport,
Kelly Townsend (our lovely secretary) and Steve Matthews take care
of your body and soul.
<h2>Consultation hours</h2>
Mon 11am - 7pm<br>
Tue 11am - 7pm<br>
Wed 3pm - 7pm<br>
Thu 11am - 7pm<br>
Fri 11am - 3pm<p>
But note that we do not offer consultation during the weeks of the
<a href=". . .">State Of Origin</a> games.

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 Problems with HTML

 Humans have no problem with this

 Machines (software agents) do:
– How distinguish therapists from the secretary,
– How determine exact consultation hours
– They would have to follow the link to the State Of
Origin games to find when they take place.

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 A Better Representation

<company>
<treatmentOffered>Physiotherapy</treatmentOffered>
<companyName>Agilitas Physiotherapy
Centre</companyName>
<staff>
<therapist>Lisa Davenport</therapist>
<therapist>Steve Matthews</therapist>
<secretary>Kelly Townsend</secretary>
</staff>
</company>

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 Explicit Metadata

 This representation is far more easily

processable by machines
 Metadata: data about data
– Metadata capture part of the meaning of data
 Semantic Web does not rely on text-based
manipulation, but rather on machine-
processable metadata

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 Ontologies

The term ontology originates from philosophy

 The study of the nature of existence

Different meaning from computer science

 An ontology is an explicit and formal
specification of a conceptualization

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 Typical Components of Ontologies

 Terms denote important concepts (classes of

objects) of the domain
– e.g. professors, staff, students, courses, departments
 Relationships between these terms: typically class
hierarchies
– a class C to be a subclass of another class C' if every
object in C is also included in C'
– e.g. all professors are staff members

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 Further Components of Ontologies

 Properties:
– e.g. X teaches Y
 Value restrictions
– e.g. only faculty members can teach courses
 Disjointness statements
– e.g. faculty and general staff are disjoint
 Logical relationships between objects
– e.g. every department must include at least 10 faculty

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 Example of a Class Hierarchy

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 The Role of Ontologies on the Web

 Ontologies provide a shared understanding

of a domain: semantic interoperability
– overcome differences in terminology
– mappings between ontologies
 Ontologies are useful for the organization
and navigation of Web sites

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 Web Ontology Languages

RDF Schema
 RDF is a data model for objects and relations
between them
 RDF Schema is a vocabulary description language
 Describes properties and classes of RDF
resources
 Provides semantics for generalization hierarchies
of properties and classes

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 Web Ontology Languages (2)

OWL
 A richer ontology language
 relations between classes
– e.g., disjointness
 cardinality
– e.g. “exactly one”
 richer typing of properties
 characteristics of properties (e.g., symmetry)

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 Logic and Inference

 Logic is the discipline that studies the

principles of reasoning
 Automated reasoners can deduce (infer)
conclusions from the given knowledge

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 An Inference Example

prof(X)  faculty(X)
faculty(X)  staff(X)
prof(michael)
We can deduce the following conclusions:
faculty(michael)
staff(michael)
prof(X)  staff(X)

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 Logic versus Ontologies

 The previous example involves knowledge

typically found in ontologies
– Logic can be used to uncover ontological
knowledge that is implicitly given
– It can also help uncover unexpected relationships
and inconsistencies
 Logic is more general than ontologies
– It can also be used by intelligent agents for
making decisions and selecting courses of action

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 Software Agents

 Software agents work autonomously and proactively

– They evolved out of object oriented and compontent-based
programming
 A personal agent on the Semantic Web will:
– receive some tasks and preferences from the person
– seek information from Web sources, communicate with
other agents
– compare information about user requirements and
preferences, make certain choices
– give answers to the user

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 Intelligent Personal Agents

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 Lecture Outline

1. Today’s Web
2. The Semantic Web Impact
3. Semantic Web Technologies
4. A Layered Approach

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 A Layered Approach

 The development of the Semantic Web

proceeds in steps
– Each step building a layer on top of another

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 The Semantic Web Layer Tower

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 Alternative Semantic Web Stack

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 Semantic Web Layers

 XML layer
– A language that lets one write structured web
documents with user defined vocabulary.
 RDF layer
– A basic data model, like the entity-relationship model,
for writing simple statements about web objects.
 Ontology layer
– More expressive languages than RDF Schema
– Current Web standard: OWL

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 Semantic Web Layers (2)

 Logic layer
– enhance ontology languages further
– application-specific declarative knowledge
 Proof layer
– Involves the actual deductive process, as well as the
representation of proofs in web languages and proof
validation.
 Trust layer
– Digital signatures
– recommendations, rating agencies ….

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