Web Technologies

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Course Outline

 History of the Web and Recent Trends

 Web 1.0 Technologies
 Web 2.0 technologies (XML)
 Semantic Web
 The Web of Linked Data
 Hot Research Areas
History of the World Wide Web

 Categorization of the Web into different generations

– Web 1.0
– Web 2.0
– Web 3.0
 Categorization of the Web into the web of
– Document
– Data
Web 1.0
Read-Only Web

 The first generation of the World Wide Web

 Characterized by separate static websites.
 It is one-way broadcasting.
 It is invented 1989 by Tim Berners- Lee.
 It was widely used between 1998 and 2004, and it is still used
beside Web 2.0.
 Static HTML pages that are updated infrequently
 Core protocols were HTTP, HTML and URI.
Web 1.0
Limitation

 The Web 1.0 pages can only be understood by humans

 The web master is solely responsible for updating users and
managing the content of website.
 Lack of Dynamic representation i.e., to acquire only static
information, no web console were available to performing
dynamic events.
Web 2.0
Read-Write Web

 The second generation of theWorld Wide Web

 People-centric web, participative web, read-write web, and bi-
directional.
 Flexible web design, creative reuse, updates, collaborative
content creation and modification were facilitated.
 Developers use three basic development
approaches:Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), Flex,
and the GoogleWeb Toolkit.
Web 2.0
People Centric Web
Web 3.0
Machine Centric Web

 Different meanings are intended to describe the evolution

of Web usage and interaction between the many possible
evolutionary paths.

 The third generation of Web technologies and services that

emphasize a machine-facilitated understanding of
information on the Web.
 Web 3.0

 It is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to

understand the meaning - or "semantics" - of information on the
World Wide Web.
 The basic idea of web 3.0 is to define structure data and link
them in order to more effective discovery, automation,
integration, and reuse across various applications
 Web of Documents

•Primary objects: documents

•Links between documents (or parts of them)
•Degree of structure in data: fairly low
•Implicit semantics of contents
•Designed for: human consumption

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 Web of Documents

 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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 Example(1):HTML page
<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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 Example(2):Web 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

 High recall, low precision.

 Low or no recall
 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 Key Problem of Today’s Web

 The meaning of Web content is not machine-

accessible: lack of semantics
 It is simply difficult to distinguish the meaning
between these two sentences:
I am a professor of computer science.
I am a professor of computer science,
you may think. Well, . . .

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 Example(3):Dumb Web

Consider that you are planning a vacation to Jimma

 Find a list of hotels that have branch in Jimma
 List shows your favorite hotel chain Boni has a branch
there
 You click on the Boni website and search for the hotel’s
location.
 Unfortunately, you do not see it in Boni’s website
 What would you call it? Dumb?
 Here with dumb we mean inconsistent
 Dumb Web to Smart Web

Suppose you wonder to know the municipalities in Trento Province

 Municipalities in the province of Trento were reorganized in 2010

 These were reduced from 223 to 217

 Still many sites listing the former statistics instead of the latter

 Because information is hard-coded in the html pages or retrieved from the

databases of the authorities to represent them on the web

 In way for human consumption only

 Not for the machines, which hinders other parties to update changes automatically
Smart Web Applications
 The Web is overwhelmed with smart applications

 To name a few applications

 Search engines’ matches are non-trivial, seem deep and intuitive
 Commerce sites recommend intelligently considering customer purchase
patterns
 Mapping sites can plan routes and provide detailed information about
geography

What role the Web infrastructure can play?

 All these smart applications are only as smart as the data provided to them
 Inconsistent data will lead to dumb result even from smart applications
 Web infrastructure needs to be improved to support better consistency of the
data the fact that smart applications can perform to their potential
 Smarter Web

A Web with an infrastructure that enhances the whole Web experience

by
 Enabling connections among data

 Letting users connect data to smart Web applications

 Not surprising us with inconsistencies

 In the case of Boni hotel branch we need a coordination

 Between the Boni site and the hotel listing site by location in the level of data

 That would help updating the list when there is a change in the location of hotels
 Web of Data

Web of data is computer understandable data

 e.g., representing the hotels as real world entities and their addresses as attributes
in Semantic Web languages using standard vocabularies

 e.g., representing each municipality of Trento as part_meronym of the province,

entity-entity connectivity within a dataset

The Semantic Web is a web of interconnected datasets where

 one data element can point to another (through URIs), rather than a webpage
points to another, forming a web of data

 the Web infrastructure provides a data model supporting a single entity can be
 The Web of Data

 Primary objects: “things” (or description of

things)
 Links between “things”
 Degree of Structure: High (based on RDF
data model)
 Explicit semantics of contents and links
 Designed for: Both machines and humans

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 The Web of Data 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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 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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 The Semantic Web Impact –
B2B Electronic Commerce

 Greatest economic promise

 Currently relies mostly on EDI
– Isolated technology, understood only by experts
– Difficult to program and maintain, error-prone
– Each B2B communication requires separate
programming
 Web appears to be perfect infrastructure
– But B2B not well supported by Web standards

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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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