An Overview of the Semantic Web

The phenomenal growth of content on the Web has made it difficult to locate, organize, and retrieve information. One way to cope is to automate these tasks. But because of the complexity of natural-language processing, we still do not have machines that can understand and analyze the content on the Web as humans do. The main idea behind the Semantic Web is to develop technologies and applications that will make the machines to understand information semantically and perform the desired task. This paper discusses some of the technologies like URI, XML, RDF and ontologies which are the core technologies being used now to develop the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web as a Semantic Soup

The Semantic Web is currently best known for adding metadata to web pages to allow computers to 'understand' what they contain. This idea has been applied to people by the Friend of a Friend project which builds up a network of who people know through their descriptions placed on web pages in RDF. It is here proposed to use RDF to describe a person and to have their RDF document follow them around the Internet. The proposed technique, dubbed Semantic Cookies, will be implemented by storing a user's RDF in a cookie on their own computer through the browser. This paper considers the concept of Semantic Cookies and investigates how far existing technology can be pushed to accommodate the idea

Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: A Norwegian case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Emerald Group Publishing LimitedPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the organisational field. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway (NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL's organisation during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on technology issues. Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined. Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology engineering

Integrating ontologies into the collaborative authoring of learning objects

Authoring learning material is a multi-disciplinary undertaking where different people can play their role. Any support that can be provided for the collaboration of instructional designers, pedagogues, media designers, and students, among others, is welcome. In particular, metadata annotation of learning objects is an important task within the whole authoring process. This work presents the first resulting products and approaches from the MD2 project, consisting of a service-oriented framework and a tool to support the integrated, ontology-based collaborative annotation of learning objects

ONTOLOGICAL HETEROGENEITY AS AN OBSTACLE FOR KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATION IN THE SEMANTIC WEB

Semantički web, kao tehnološka paradigma koja određuje pravce razvoja World Wide Weba, privukla je veliku i raznoliku zajednicu obrazovnih i istraživačkih institucija, pa i poslovnih tvrtki, koje dijele zajedničko uvjerenje da će semantički web preoblikovati način kako World Wide Web funkcionira te kako se koristi. U radu je opisana revolucionarna ideja paradigme semantičkog weba kao i njezini postulati koji se temelje na formalnoj logici i automatiziranom rasuđivanju. Navedeni su programski jezici i druge tehnologije koje omogućuju realizaciju semantičkog weba. Također, naznačeni su najvažniji alati za praktičnu implementaciju semantičkog weba. Analizirani su glavni izazovi koji sprečavaju potpunu realizaciju paradThe Semantic Web as a World Wide Web trend setting technological paradigm has attracted a large and diverse community of educational and research institutions, as well as enterprise companies, all sharing a common belief that one day the Semantic Web will reshape the way the current World Wide Web functions and is being used. The groundbreaking idea behind the Semantic Web paradigm is described together with its formal logic and automated reasoning background. The enabling programming languages and other computer technologies are specified. Additionally, the most important tools for practical implementation of the Semantic Web are listed. Major challenges preventing the complete realization of the Semantic Web paradigm are analyzed