Semantic Web

Semantic Web = meaningful network.

"If HTML and the WEB have turned the entire online document into a hugebook, then RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world become a hugeDatabase""

--- Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

What is the Semantic Web?

semantic (of meaning)This word refers toInteresting or related。

The Semantic Web is a network that uses a way for things to be described that can be understood by computers.

  • The Beatles is a famous band from Liverpool.
  • John Lennon was one of the members of The Beatles.
  • The album 'Hey Jude' was recorded by The Beatles.

Sentences like this can be understood by humans. But how can they be understood by computers?

statementsis composed ofSyntax rulesA language's syntax defines the rules required to construct statements in that language.

This is the essence of the Semantic Web - describing things in a way that computer applications can understand.

The links between the Semantic Web and the World Wide WebNo relationship。

The semantic web describesrelationships between things(such as A is part of B, and Y is a member of Z) andProperties of thingssuch as size, weight, shelf life, and price, etc.).

Resource Description Framework

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a markup language used to describe information and resources on the Internet.

Putting information into RDF files, so that these information may be searched, discovered, collected, filtered, analyzed, and processed by computer programs ("web spiders") from the network.

The semantic web uses RDF to describe web resources.

If you want to learn more about RDF, please read ourRDF Tutorial》

How to use the semantic web?

If information about music, cars, tickets (or anything else) is stored in RDF files, intelligent network applications will collect information from different sources, integrate it, and then present it to users in a meaningful way.

Information similar to the following:

  • Car prices from different dealers
  • Drug Information
  • Flight Schedule
  • Industrial Spare Parts
  • Book Information (price, pages, editor, year)
  • Who is someone
  • Event Date
  • Software Updates

Is the semantic web technology easy to understand?

The semantic web is not a rapidly evolving technology.

One of the reasons is its learning curve. RDF was developed by people with academic backgrounds in logic and artificial intelligence. It is not particularly easy to understand for general developers.

RSS is a rapidly evolving language for building semantic web applications. If you want to learn more about RSS, please read ourRSS Tutorial》。

In the following tutorials, we will focus on the use of RDF to discover the potential of the semantic web.

Please click on the next chapter, where you can see a simple example of a semantic web application.