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Home » Semantic Web

Semantic Web

Semantic web is an extended version and type of the world wide web. In this type of program, the content of the web can be understood by the software agents and at the same time in the natural language. This dual purpose served by the content helps in finding information easily along with sharing and integration of the information. Semantic web has been derived as universal medium for information, knowledge exchange and data. Semantic web is comprised of collaborative working groups, variety of technologies and design principles along with a philosophy. There are many other variations of the semantic web that are being developed by programmers. Formal specifications show the other elements present in the semantic web.
Some of the elements in this kind of web are Resource Description Framework (RDF), data interchange formats, RDF Schema (RDFS) and Web Ontology Language (WOL). All these elements describe concepts, terms and relationships in the knowledge domain that is given.

Since the computer cannot understand the human languages and can only understand the binary language, the command used to search the web cannot be understood by the computer. The web pages are designed in such a way that only humans can understand the data while the computer cannot. But by the help of semantic web, the languages are transformed for the computer to understand it. The computer in turn can assist in the finding, sharing and combining of the data and informations on the web. In the search engines, the websites are provided with common standard (RDF) due to the semantic web. The websites in turn publish data and information so that it is readily machine-processable and integrable form. From semantic web, semantic publishing will benefit the most. Scientific publishing too is expected to take a very different turn with the launching of the semantic web. There can be sharing of the data and scientific experiments on the Internet by semantic web.

This scientific publishing is being developed by the Scientific Publishing Task Force of the W3C HCLS group. The content published on the Internet or the web are by the means of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). There are meta-tags for the benefit of the programmer to let them publish the text. By this text, the computer is able to understand the content. In semantic web, the data or information is published in a language known as Resource Description Framework (RDF). In this format, the files and data can be stored and kept on the computer and at the same time manipulate it. With HTML, the description is of the data, documents and the links while in the RDF format, the description is of arbitrary things.

Many shortcomings of the HTML format are solved by the semantic web. It is done so by the means of descriptive technologies like Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL), and customized version of Extensible Markup Language (XML). All these technologies are combines to create it. The web contents can be supplemented or replaced to give descriptions to the computer. Therefore content can seem as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases.