The Semantic Web

About The Semantic Web – Part 1

Posted on 24. Jan, 2010 by admin in About

OK this is a Quick Start guide to entering the world of ‘The Semantic Web’. Firstly I am not a techie and in fact am trying to understand it all myself, however in order to understand it I thought I would document my findings in this way.

Complicated to understand for the non techie? – Yes

Do we need to understand it? – Yes

Why? – Because Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the Internet says that this is his vision of where the Internet is going. A bit like following Warren Buffett in the financial world.

So lets look at what we have now and what is to come.

The Internet looked at through the browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The existing web consists of lots of in escence of pages of text, displayed to us through our browsers. As humans we can read this and understand it. Look at this exampe:

• I love cars

We know what ‘I’ means and ‘love’ and ‘cars’. Computers only recognise the text (syntax), they dont understand the ‘meaning’. For example when youuse the Google Search engine you type in words (keywords) and Google hunts for these words and displays them in the search results. What you are getting is a bunch of results where Google has found the words.

Did Google understand what you meant? – NO it only looked for the words. It didnt understand the meaning of your search enquiry

What is another word for ‘meaning’ – SEMANTIC – Bingo !

‘The Semantic Web’

OK so Tim Berbners-Lee vision is to give meaning to these words so that the computers can understand what they are. This in effect means that there would have to be a massive database of information about everything in the world. No one company or person could do this. So he has suggested that everyone makes their own database in effect and lets a central organistaion know about it. What then happens is  all the data is linked together and bingo you have results that are specific to what you want because the computers have a database of all the meanings. Tim Berners-Lee calls this ‘Linked Data’

Simple example:

Whilst writing this in the backend of Wordpress I have a plugin that  uses a database (Calais) that shows me suggested tags and images from flikr that I can add to my article based on what I write. How does it do that? Because the photographer has defined their picture with tagged words. So lets me type the word ‘Tim Berners-Lee’

There you have it I picked which photo I wanted and inserted it into my post. Now you can see who this man is.

So that was a simple example of using ‘Linked Data’. My plugin looked for ‘linked data’ about Tim Berners-Lee I selected it and entered it into my post.

So how do you see this ths ‘Linked Data’ through your normal day to day browser?

Hopefully you will have got the idea so far – leave a comment if not.

Internet Explorer or Firefox?

I will use firefox to demonstrate how this is done (o let me add an image as my plugin has just found an image related to Firefox)

If you dont have Firefox I suggest you download this now. I have no particular preference but I found more development of addons for Firefox. You can get it here.

If you were in IE then please go to www.the-semantic-web.co.uk in your new Firefox browser.

The Semantic Web is new so the developers of the browsers have not incorporated the facility to view in the standard program. At this time there only appears to be addons. I will use a plugin called ‘Headup‘ you can get it here

OK now that everything is installed view this post in Firefox with the addon installed.

It may take about ten minutes for the system to work out whats on the page.

What do you see?

Certain words have a dotted underline a bit like a hyperlink, some are bold and some are not. Hover your mouse over a Bold underline and see what happens.

Here are some items that will display the linked data as an example:

Tim Berners-Lee

Warren Buffett

Semantic Web

Linked Data

A popup shows you the linked data to this ‘object’. It links News,Photos,Videos,Tweets without leaving your website and you dont even need to know about programming.

OK thats the end of Step 1 next I will be looking at how you can get on The Semantic Web. If you have any questions or comments please eave them below.

Tags: Google, Google Inc., Linked Data, Mozilla Firefox, search results, Semantic Web, Tim Berbners-Lee, Tim BernersLee, Warren Buffett, Web search engine, World Wide Web Consortium