What is the Semantic Web?
This is an article for those who like to know about semantic web. In order to understand this article, you don't need to be a web developer or a programmer. This is for anyone who loves to get a high-level idea about 'Semantic Web'. Kind of a kick-start guide :D.
Semantic Web has been conceived in order to allow computers to intelligently understand, search and process the content in the web. On the other hands, in the absence of human intervention, computer/machines/robots should be able to process what is already knew by the human without their help. This could only be accomplished if the computers/machines or robots know the meaning of the things that they are doing just like humans. Otherwise, just like a parrot mimic what humans say, computers would process the task that is commanded by humans without actually knowing what it is doing.
Semantic Web Technologies does not belong to Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence or Natural Language Processing. Yet, all these technologies have a symbiotic relationship.
Semantic Web has its own set of technologies which can be used to define the meaning of (web) resources. If you have ever work with web or web pages you may have heard the term HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML consists set of browser processable (machine processable) syntax. For example, this webpage consists of texts and these HTML syntaxes and provide you with this nice view for you to read this article. If you click on the link associated with the word HTML above you will be directed to Wikipedia page which describes what is HTML. Yet, your computer or web browser doesn't know why you click that, why you directed to Wikipedia HTML page. It just does what we have instructed.
Further explaining, look at the two sentences. I love web technologies. and I ❤ web technologies. . Both these sentences mean the same thing. Yet, we have used two different syntaxes. As humans, we can understand this but as a computer, unless we specify this it can not. The computer doesn't understand the meaning (semantics). This is where we need Semantic Web Technologies.
If there's a way that computer understands why we click on HTML word (example above) and where that click directs us, what is the intention behind those actions, then computer good suggest you better places to learn about HTML. If the computer program shows you all the web technologies when you say I love web technologies. then it should show the same for I ❤ web technologies. as well. Because they mean the same and computer should also understand this. This is the intention of the Semantic Web.
The red box content showed beside your Google search (As in Figure_2 above) use this technology. They call it Google Knowledge Graph. It relates to the meaning/semantics of your search rather than the syntaxes.
Now you understand what is the intention of the semantic web. It is to build a meaningful web where even machines could understand what out there. "The term “Semantic Web” was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which oversees the development of proposed Semantic Web standards".[Semantic Web — Wikipedia]
Since computers couldn't understand human-readable language, human knowledge should be modelled in a way that computer/machine could draw conclusions. If you could scroll up and check the Figure_1, you will see that picture is labelled/modelled has arrows describes it further in order for anyone to understand it more. So someone who doesn't know (an alien may be :D) this picture can get an understanding thanks to the labels. But anyone could model or label it as they want it. So it is always better to have a standard way of doing it. Well, that is what semantic web technologies simply try to do. Helping the computers/machines to understand the meaning of the resources interacting with them and then to draw conclusions. Therefore, semantic web technologies are used to create formal knowledge representation and reasoning methods which could be understood by the machines. This technology is endowed with a set of modelling, querying, and reasoning techniques/standards which helps to interlink heterogeneous and distributed information by incorporating knowledge modelling and reasoning.
During the past decade or so, W3C has published a number of standards for Semantic Web. These include RDF (Resource Description Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language), SPARQL (a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) mainly. There are a few more but knowing these three would be enough for you to get going. All the resources which are modelled under the semantic web technologies use a unique identifier call URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). This is like your SSN (Social Security Number or National ID number). URI is used to identify each resource uniquely. Most of the time URI is similar to a URL (Universal Resource Locator) from its look and shape but they are two different concepts. You could get a better understanding by reading this article "URL, URI and URN". Further, terms vocabulary and ontology are something worth exploring if you are would like to start exploring semantic web technologies. This is all you need to know to understand how to get started with Semantic Web technologies.
Once you are familiar with the concept/theory, then you can go the next step which is the implementation of it. There are tools out there like Protégé and Apache Jena Fuseki which will help you in this.
In this article, I tried to provide you with a very high-level understanding about what is ‘Semantic Web’ and what are the things you need to be aware of if you are to start working with it. The intention of this article is to provide you with a kick start so you know what are the elements you need to learn. As always I wish good luck and do not forget to leave your feedback.
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