SEMINAR REPORT--SEMANTIC WEB

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I express my sincere thanks to The Assistant Co-ordinator and Guide for their kind co-
operation for presenting the seminar.
I also express my sincere thanks to all other members of the faculty of Computer
Science Department and my friends for their co-operation and encouragement.

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ABSTRACT

Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow

machines to understand the meaning – or "semantics" – of information on the World Wide Web. The
term was coined by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee. He defines the
Semantic Web as “a web of data that processed directly and indirectly by machines.” While the term
"Semantic Web" is not formally defined it is mainly used to describe the model and technologies
proposed by the W3C. These technologies include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety
of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema
(RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal
description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain. The key element is
that the application in context will try to determine the meaning of the text or other data and then create
connections for the user. The evolution of Semantic Web will specifically make possible scenarios that
were not otherwise, such as allowing customers to share and utilize computerized applications
simultaneously in order to cross reference the time frame of activities with documentation and/or data.
According to the original vision, the availability of machine-readable metadata would enable automated
agents and other software to access the Web more intelligently. The agents would be able to perform
tasks automatically and locate related information on behalf of the user. Many of the technologies
proposed by the W3C already exist and are used in various projects. The Semantic Web as a global
vision, however, has remained largely unrealized and its critics have questioned the feasibility of the
approach. In addition other technologies with similar goals, such as micro formats, have evolved, which
are not always described as "Semantic Web".

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CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION
2. PURPOSE
2.1 SEMANTIC PUBLISHING
2.2. SEMANTIC BLOGGING
2.3 WEB 3.0
3. RELATION SHIP TO HYPERTEXT WEB
3.1 LIMITATIONS OF HTML
3.2 SEMANTIC WEB SOLUTIONS
4. SKEPTIAL REACTION
4.1 THE POTENTIAL OF AN IDEA IN FAST PROGRESS
4.2 CENSORSHIP AND PRIVACY
4.3 DOUBLING OUTPUT FORMATS
4.4 NEED
5. COMPONENTS
6. CHALLENGES
7. PROJECTS
7.1 FOAF
7.2 GOOD RELATIONS FOR E-COMMERCE
7.3 SIOC
7.4 SIMILE
7.5 QUERTLE
8 .CONCLUSION
9. REFERENCE

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1.INTRODUCTION
Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily
processable by machines.
Definition-Semantic Web is not a separate web but an extension of the current one, in which
information is given well-defined meanings , better enabling computers and people to work in
coorporation.It is a source to retrieve information from the web and access the data through semantic
web agents or semantic web services. Simply semantic web is a data about data or metadata.Semantic
web is an extension of existing World Wide Web.
The key technical standards for the Semantic Web are RDF and OWL, both of which
were concieved by Tim Berners-Lee and later developed into working standards by the collective
efforts of many contributors to W3C working groups. These standards provide a consistent, unifed
way of representing knowledge and information as well as mechnisms for exchanging this
information.
In semantic web, informations are put in to RDF files (Resource Description Frame
Work). It is a language for describing information and resource on the web. Semantic web uses RDF to
describe web resources.Eg:- The information about music, cars, tickets were stored in RDF files ,
intelligent web applications could collect informations from many different sources, combine
information and present it to users in a meaningful way.
Informations are like this:
 Cars prices from different resellers
 Informations about medicines
 Plane schedules
 Spare parts for the industry
 Information about books(price,pages,editor,year)

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2. PURPOSE

The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current
Web by allowing users to use it to its full potential thus allowing users to find, share, and combine
information more easily. Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the
Irish word for "folder," reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However,
machines cannot accomplish all of these 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 can be
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 application areas are
experiencing intensified interest due to the rapid growth in the use of the Web, together with the
innovation and renovation of information content technologies.. The rapidity of the growth
experienced provides the impetus for researchers to focus on the creation and dissemination of
innovative Semantic Web technologies, where the envisaged ’Semantic Web’ is long overdue.

2.1 Semantic Publishing

Semantic publishing will greatly benefit from the semantic web. In particular, the
semantic web is expected to revolutionize scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and
sharing of experimental data on the Internet. This simple but radical idea is now being explored by
W3C HCLS group'sScientific Publishing Task Force.

2.2 Semantic Blogging

Semantic blogging, like semantic publishing, will change the way blogs are read.
Currently "the process of blogging inherently emphasizes metadata creation more than traditional
Web publishing methodologies". Some blog users already tag their entries with topics, allowing for
easier migration into a semantic web environment. It is intentionally saved in not only a human-
readable format, but also in a machine-readable format as the tags can be linked easily to other blogs
containing similar information. When a release of a game or movie occurs, bloggers tend to rate them
using their own system. If there were to be a unified system, these blogs could easily become
assimilated using similar semantics and give a user a score when searching using a semantic search.

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2.3 Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0. The
internet community as a whole tends to find the two terms "Semantic Web" and "Web 3.0" to be at le-
ast synonymous in concept if not completely interchangeable The overwhelming consensus is that
Web 3.0 is most assuredly the "next big thing" but there only lies speculation as to just what that
might be. It will be an improvement in the respect that it will still contain Web 2.0 properties. Web
3.0 will be more application based and center its efforts towards more graphically capable
environments, "non-browser applications and non-computer based devices, geographic or location
based information retrieval and even more applicable use and growth of Artificial Intelligence. For
example, Conrad Wolfram, has argued that Web 3.0 is where "the computer is generating new
information", rather than humans.

2.4 Expressing Meaning

Web is not a separate web but an extension of current one, in which information is given
well defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The essential
property of the WWW is its universality. the power if a hypertext link is that “anything can link to
anything”. Web technology there for, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the
polished performance, between commercial and academic information

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3. RELATIONSHIP TO HYPERTEXT WEB

3.1 Limitations of HTML

Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data.
Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars,
addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them
be viewed, searched and combined in many ways. Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly
on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for
coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms.

3.2 Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages
specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language
(OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links
between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people,
meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant
Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web. These technologies are combined in
order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content
may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases, or as markup within

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documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or purely in XML.
In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human
deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers
to perform automated information gathering and research.

4. URI , RDF AND NOTATION3

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The Semantic Web is generally built on syntaxes which use URIs to represent data,
usually in triples based structures: i.e. many triples of URI data that can be held in databases, or
interchanged on the World Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the
task. These syntaxes are called "Resource Description Framework".

4.1 URI - Uniform Resource Identifier

A URI is simply a Web identifier: like the strings starting with "http:" or "ftp:" that you
often find on the World Wide Web. Anyone can create a URI, and the ownership of them is clearly
delegated, so they form an ideal base technology with which to build a global Web on top of.

4.2 RDF - Resource Description Framework

A triple can simply be described as three URIs. A language which utilises three URIs in
such a way is called RDF: the W3C have developed an XML serialization of RDF, the "Syntax" in the
RDF Model and Syntax recommendation. RDF XML is considered to be the standard interchange
format for RDF on the Semantic Web.Once information is in RDF form, it becomes easy to process it,
since RDF is a generic format, an example of XML RDF :-

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/0.1/foaf/" >
<rdf:Description rdf:about="">
<dc:creator rdf:parseType="Resource">
<foaf:name>Sean B. Palmer</foaf:name>
</dc:creator>
<dc:title>The Semantic Web: An Introduction</dc:title>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

This piece of RDF basically says that this article has the title "The Semantic Web: An
Introduction", and was written by someone whose name is "Sean B. Palmer". Here are the triples that
this RDF produces:-

<> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator> _:x0 .

this <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "The Semantic Web: An Introduction" .

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_:x0 <http://xmlns.com/0.1/foaf/name> "Sean B. Palmer" .

This format is actually a plain text serialization of RDF called "Notation3", some
people actually prefer using XML RDF to Notation3, but it is generally accepted that Notation3 is
easier to use, and is of course convertable to XML RDF anyway.

4.3 Notation3: RDF Made Easy

XML RDF can be rather difficult, but there is simpler teaching forms of RDF. One
of these is called "Notation3", and was developed by Tim Berners-Lee.

The design criteria behind Notation3 were fairly simple: design a simple easy to learn
scribblable RDF format, that is easy to parse and build larger applications on top of. In Notation3, we
can simply write out the URIs in a triple, delimiting them with a "<" and ">" symbols. For example,
here's a simple triple consisting of three URI triples:-

<http://xyz.org/#a> <http://xyz.org/#b> <http://xyz.org/#c>.

To use literal values, simply enclose the value in double quote marks, thus:-

<http://xyz.org/#Sean> <http://xyz.org/#name> "Sean".

You simply use an underscore and a colon, and then put a little label there:-

_:a1 <http://xyz.org/#name> "Sean".

This may be read as "there is something that has the name Sean", or "a1 has the name
Sean, for some value of a1".

4.SKEPTIAL REACTIONS

4.1 The potential of an idea in fast progress

The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected

evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web. A complete evolution as described by Berners-Lee

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has yet to occur. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea, however,
remains largely unrealized." While the idea is still in the making, it seems to evolve quickly and
inspire many. Between 2007–2010 several scholars have already explored first applications and the
social potential of the Semantic Web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking
and even for the broader evolution of democracy, specifically, how a society forms its common will
in a democratic manner through a Semantic Web.

4.2 Censorship and privacy

Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding

censorship and privacy.For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using
other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced
implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the
viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an
automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that,
with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity
associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog.

4.3 Doubling output formats

Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-
consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of
data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development
are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the
request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this
kind of criticism. Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in
HTML pages.

4.4 Need

The idea of a Semantic Web, able to describe and associate meaning with data
necessarily involves more than simple XHTML mark-up code. It is based on an assumption that in
order for it to be possible to endow machines with an ability to accurately interpret web homed

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content, far more than the mere ordered relationships involving letters and words, is necessary as
underlying infrastructure .Additions to the infrastructure to support semantic functionality include
latent dynamic network models that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn'
meaning based on order data, in the process 'learning' relationships with order.

5. COMPONENTS

The Semantic Web comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF,
RDF Schema and OWL that are organized in the Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology
Language Overview describes the function and relationship of each of these components of the
semantic web:

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 XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet
associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.
XML is not at present a necessary component of Semantic Web technologies in
most cases, as alternative syntaxes exists, such as Turtle.Turtle is a de facto
standard, but has not been through a formal standardization process.

 XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and
content of elements contained within XML documents.

 RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects
("resources") and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented
in XML syntax.

 RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and
classes of RDF based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of
such properties and classes.

 OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among
others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly
one"), equality, richer typing of
 properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated
classes.

 SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.

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THE SEMANTIC WEB STACK

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6. CHALLENGES

Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness,
uncertainty, inconsistency, and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these
issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web.

Vastness:
The World Wide Web contains at least 24 billion pages. The SNOMED CT medical
terminology ontology contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to
eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with
truly huge inputs.

Vagueness:
These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the vagueness
of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider

Uncertainty:
These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might pres
ent a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a
different probability .Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address
uncertainty.

Inconsistency:
These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development
of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning
fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because "anything follows from a
contradiction". Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be
employed to deal with inconsistency.

Deceit:
This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the
consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat.

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7. PROJECTS

This section lists some of the many projects and tools that exist to create Semantic
Web solutions.

7.1 FOAF

A popular application of the semantic web is Friend of a Friend (or FoaF), which
uses RDF to describe the relationships people have to other people and the "things" around them.
FOAF permits intelligent agents to make sense of the thousands of connections people have with each
other, their jobs and the items important to their lives; connections that may or may not be
enumerated in searches using traditional web search engines. Because the connections are so vast in
number, human interpretation of the information may not be the best way of analyzing them. FOAF is
an example of how the Semantic Web attempts to make use of the relationships within a social
context.

7.2 Good Relations for e-commerce

The Good Relations ontologies is a popular vocabulary for expressing product
information, prices, payment options, etc. It also allows expressing demand in a straightforward
fashion.
.
7.3 SIOC
The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project (SIOC, pronounced
"shock") provides a vocabulary of terms and relationships that model web data spaces. Examples of
such data spaces include, among others: discussion forums, blogs, mailing lists, shared bookmarks
and image galleries.
7.4 SIMILE
Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments
SIMILE is a joint project, conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL, which seeks to enhance
interoperability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, meta data, and services.

7.5 Quertle

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Finding relevant information in the biomedical literature is critical to the

advancement of medicine, life sciences, and chemical sciences. With more than 20 million documents
and over one million new documents being added every year, finding what is relevant is extremely
difficult using traditional search methods. Quertle is search engine of the biomedical and life science
literature that matches a user's search against a meta database of subject-verb-object relationships
extracted from the literature.
Additional semantic methods are used to automatically identify key concepts for
drilling down.

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8. CONCLUSION

Semantic Web is a maturing field of technology that continues to be the emphasis of

much focused research. This foundational text introduces the standardized knowledge representation
languages for modeling ontologies operating at the core of the semantic web. Purpose of the Semantic
Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by allowing users to use it to its full potential thus
allowing users to find, share, and combine information more easily.Humans are capable of using the
Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for "folder," reserving a library book, and
searching for a low price for a DVD. However, machines cannot accomplish all of these tasks without
human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines.
To support the presentation of each language, the authors explain syntax and
underlying intuitions through examples, with separate treatment of the underlying formal semantics.
They cover RDF Schema, Web Ontology Language (OWL), rules, and query languages, such as
SPARQL. The book also presents recent developments concerning the OWL 2 revision and the
forthcoming Rule Interchange Format (RIF).

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9.REFERENCE

www.semanticweb.org

www.altova.com

www.webopedia.com

www.w3schools.com

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