DITA session 8

The Semantic Web and Web 3.0

In this session we looked at what the Semantic Web is and its relation to web 3.0. the differences between Web 1.0 (read), Web 2.0 (read/write) and Web 3.0 (read/write/execute).

The Semantic Web has been touted since the inception of the net by the W3C consortium led by Tim Berners-Lee and it aims to give richer meaning to information and make that information machine readable. This allows for information to become unambiguous.

We looked at how RDF triples are made up of a subject (a resource), an object (a property of the subject) and a predicate (the relationship between the two).

we looked at how the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative are implementing a set of rules for metadata for the predicates.  then we saw how the RDF triples can form webs of data by linking together using each others objects to become subjects.

then we looked at the taxonomies involved with RDF's that allow a schema to be produced. and how most taxonomies are hierarchical but not all are.

Then we took a look at OWL (Web Ontology Language) and how these set out the rules for the taxonomies and how they create relationships.

then the Semantic Web Stack was looked at and how it is made up of:
Web Resources
RDF (metadata)
RDFS (taxonomies)
OWL (ontology's)

The advantages of the Semantic web are that it allows for emergent behaviour where lots of facts + a few rules of inference = very surprisingly sophisticated results. But this only works in limited domains and there takes a huge input of effort for a very small output of data and there are also issues of trust in both the validity of the data put in and the metadata used.