The Semantic Web

Introduction

The World Wide Web, an interlinked series of documents that cover a near infinite array of topics all hosted on servers around the world, began as the vision of Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first paper to suggest hypertext as a way of linking pages together was Berners-Lee's "Information Management: A Proposal" written in 1989 and the term "World Wide Web" itself was coined in 1990 (Connolly). Today, millions of people interact with various websites that grew out of Berners-Lee's project at CERN. The information and services available on the web have exploded in recent years, but this decentralized proliferation of documents also resulted in the information in them being relatively fragmented and spread across websites around the world. Different documents have different bits of information that could logically be grouped together, but the world wide web and hypertext can only link the web pages containing the information together. To solve this problem and usher in a new era of data storage and access, a new proposal by Tim Berners-Lee was presented in the early 2000s: The Semantic Web (Berners-Lee [1]).

According to the W3C, "the Semantic Web is a web of data" (Herman). The goal of the Semantic Web is to organize the data available on the web in a way that makes it easily identified by computer programs as data of a certain type (e.g. names, phone numbers, calendar dates, and e-mail addresses) and to allow this data to be 'meshed' together in the same way the World Wide Web forms a web of documents. The Semantic Web, and the technologies that drive it, will allow for data integration, resource discovery and classification, and cataloguing content and content relationships in particular websites or digital libraries (Herman). These abilities have and will allow for advancements in the way social, scientific, and medical data is stored and accessed.

Sections

• Technologies
  • XML
  • RDF
  • OWL
  • SPARQL
• Implementations
  • Social Networking
  • Scholarly Databases
  • Medicine
  • Another Potential Implementation
• Conclusions
  • Criticisms
  • Closing Thoughts
• Example
  • Jaccard Index
  • Phylogenetic Tree from XML
  • Other Thoughts
• Resources

Technologies >>

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Sources

Berners-Lee, Tim [1]. "The Semantic Web." Scientific American. 17 May 2001. Web. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web>.

Connolly, Dan, and Robert Cailliau. "A Little History of the World Wide Web." World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 2000. Web. 22 Mar. 2011. <http://www.w3.org/History.html>.

Herman, Ivan. "W3C Semantic Web FAQ." World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 12 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ>.

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'The Semantic Web' by Conrad Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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