The History About Web Semantics

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The Semantic Web is a joint group led by the international standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). [8] Semantic Web aims at converting the current web dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a "web of data."

The Semantic Web Activity is an idea of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as it is designed to provide guidance and the definition of the Web. According to the W3C, Semantic Web provides a common framework that is meant data to be shared and reused across application. [8] The term Web Semantic was coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web who is also the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C supervised the development of proposed Semantic Web standards. Tim Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines." [8]

7.1 The Objectives of Semantic Web

The objective of the Semantic Web initiative is to help create a universal medium in the exchange of data. [5] It is seen to help interlink information management, enterprise application, the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. This is done by putting machine-understandable data on the Web.

The vision of the Semantic Web is to expand values of the Web from documents to data. [7] Data is supposed to be accessed using the general web architecture. This also means forming a general framework that can help data to be shared across application, enterprise, to be dealt with automatically by technologies. [7]

7.2 Web Semantics Basics

Semantic web improves search engine results as searching the web results with an overload of information that might be or not what a user is looking for. With this result, a user might need to go through a load of information which may or may not need at all. But using the semantic web means that the user is linked automatically to relevant data, therefore, providing with a more affluent or relevant set of information. This may also result with potentially more related information that might be also valuable. [6]

Let us use a relevant example here: if a user is searching for flight times to London, ‘London" might also be connected to another relevant information, such as weather reports. In this case a semantic search results with the flight times in London, but there might also appear details about the weather, information of an event in London or UK and other helpful information such as tourist attraction, sightseeing.

By trying to do a search for one specific thing, the semantic web provides the user with information to the search in question. Technically, semantic web allows machines to grasp the "semantics, or meaning, of information strewn across cyberspace." [6]

Web semantics connects sets of data by drawing together relevant pieces of information from many online sources, such as blogs, external websites and data sets, online journals and e-books. The results from a search can also be sorted and catalogued for the reader’s convenience using a variety if contextual facets such as listing the number of content items associated with a given concept to show, at a glance, the volume of material available. The outcome is a much more effective and helpful experience of online searching – ultimately reducing the amount of time involved in finding relevant content.

The basic mechanism of semantic web is made of: [6]

Triples: This is a way which describes content things and it is inferred across a wider data set;

Linked Data: This is a set of finest perform for pulling out the data. It supports connections and stress data interconnections;

Resource Description Framework : This is a framework for revealing and sharing data on the web.

Ontology: This is about the machine readable format of interaction between thoughts often based on a restricted vocabulary or taxonomy;

Mash-up: It is an application that blend data from multiple sources to make something novel.

The advantage with the semantic web is that it is a groundbreaking technology which has an innate end user as it can help us in business if applied to a real requirement within any given situation. [6]

According to W3C [7] Semantic Web technologies can be used in an assortment of application areas. Some of these applications are:

It can be used in data integration where data in various locations and various formats can be integrated into one;

In resource finding and arrangement to make available better, domain-specific search engine capabilities;

In cataloguing for describing the content and content connections presented at a specific Web site, page, or digital library;

By intelligent software agents to make easy knowledge sharing and exchange;

In the content evaluation;

In describing collected works of pages that represent a single logical "document";

For describing intellectual property rights of Web pages.

It is believed that the Web can attain its full ability if it turns out to be a place where data is shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. [4] The hope of data management, integration and pursuit could remain in semantic web technology. [4]

Sharing of information is becoming a major task within all organisations. To gain a greater level of productivity, improve organisational agility while at the same time simplifying organization’s activity, technology such as web semantic is the right solutions for the organisations.

To enact the objectives of web semantics, one important element is to delineate the relations among data on the Web. Such relationships can be set up between any two resources, there is no notion of "current" page. [7] Another important variation is that the relationship itself.

Information retrieval by searching information on the web is not a fresh idea but has different challenges when it is compared to general information retrieval. Different search engines return different search results due to the variation in indexing and search process. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have been out there, which handles the queries after processing the keywords. They only search information given on the web page, recently; some research group’s started delivering results from their semantics based search engines. However, most of them are in their initial stages. Until none of the search engines come to close indexing the entire web content, much less the entire Internet.

8. Semantic Search Engines

Semantic is the procedure of conveying adequate meaning to affect an action. A series of

symbols can be employed to communicate value, and this communication can then influence actions. Semantics has been the force which motivated the next generation of the Web. It is the centre of the task of semantics for a programmed approach to exploit web resources.

Semantic also point out that the sense of information from the web can be exposed not just by users, but also by computers. Semantic Web was fashioned to widen the scope of web and make data uncomplicated to reuse everywhere. Semantic web is being developed to overcome the following restrictions of the current Web.[9]

The web content lacks a proper structure regarding the representation of information.

Uncertainty of information following poor interconnection of information.

Automatic information transfer is lacking.

Incapable with dealing with large number of users and content ensuring trust at all levels.

Inability of machines to understand the provided information due to lack of a universal format.

In the web environment, it difficult for the machine to understand the information provided by the user. When the information is dispersed in web, there are some problems in search engine some of these are:[9]

How can a search engine map a query to documents where information is available but

Does not retrieve in intelligent and meaning full information?

The query results produced by search engines are distributed across different documents

How search engine can recognize efficiently such distributed results?

Obviously, semantic web can work out the first difficulty in web with semantic remarks to produce intelligent and significant information by means of query interface device and ontology. The Semantic web needs solve extremely hard problems in the areas of knowledge representation, natural language understanding. [9]

Current web is the biggest global database that lacks the existence of a semantic structure, and

hence it makes difficult for the machine to understand the information provided by the user. When the information was distributed in web, we have two kinds of research problems in search engine i.e.

How can a search engine map a query to documents where information is available but does not retrieve in intelligent and meaning full information?

The query results produced by search engines are distributed across different documents

How search engine can recognise resourcefully such distributed results?

Semantic web can solve the first problem in web with semantic annotations to produce intelligent and meaningful information by using query interface device and ontology. Other one can be solved by the graph-based query models. The Semantic web would require solving extraordinarily difficult problems in the areas of knowledge representation, natural language understanding. [9]

8.1 Some Important and Common Issues in Web Semantics

Some common issues in the current semantic search engines and methods are concluded as follows: [9]

Low precision and high recall: Some Intelligent semantic search engines cannot show their significant performance in improving precision and lowering recall. In Ding’s semantic flash search engine, the resource of the search engine is based on the top-50 returned results from Google that is not a semantic `search engine, which could be low precision and high recall.

Identity intention of the user: User intention identification plays an important role in the intelligent semantic search engine.

The request terms to fit user intention, so that the service provided will be more suitable to the user.

Individual user patterns can be extrapolated to global users. In early search engine that offered disambiguation to search terms. A user could enter into a search term that was ambiguous (e.g., Java) and the search engine would return a list of alternatives (coffee, programming language, island in the South Seas).

Inaccurate queries. We have the user typically domain-specific knowledge. And users don’t include all potential.

Synonyms and variations in the query, actually user has a problem but is not sure how to phrase.

9. Conclusion

Web semantics is an important issue in today’s web service environment. In this project, I have discussed some of the most important issues related to web semantics.

As discussed above, the objective of the Semantic Web initiative is to create a general intermediate for the exchange of information and data. The technology is seen to help interweave information management, enterprise application, the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. This is done by putting machine-understandable data on the Web. The dream of the Semantic Web is to increase ideals of the Web from documents to data.