The Semantic Web and Your Website

So you got the idea in Part 1 (hopefully) if so read on and get to grips with how to get your website notced on The Semantic Web.

Your website at present just presents your information to the public. Generally your information is just typed in or is accessed from a database (like mySQL) that lives on your server. Nobody can access this data and quite rightly you dont want anybody getting access to it so that it can be hacked. Imagine if the data that is displayed on your web page could be accessed by others directly from you page. This is where the semantic web comes in. By using various formats in your html or php yo can make this information available to anyone. Lets have a look at what you need to do to amke this visible.

OK so you have heard of HTML and possibly PHP and ASP they are all methods of producing pages on the Internet. There is no change there but there is a new method based on XML that needs to be used (until some genus comes out with a Graphical method of doing it GUI).

There are three (at the moment) methods of providing information to the Semantic Web and Yahoo seem to be the only search engines grabbing the opportunity:

1. Microformats

• hAtom
• hCalendar
• hCard
• hReview
• XFN

2. RDF

3. Data RSS Feeds

**** Dont Panic****
I didnt know what these were either Ive found out and will tell you. Lets Look at:

Microformats

Im not going into the description of this but show you an example of its use:

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.

The word semantic stands for the meaning of.

The semantic of something is the meaning of something.

The Semantic Web = a Web with a meaning.

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

* The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
* John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
* “Hey Jude” was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers?

Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price)
The Web

“If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database”
Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

The Resource Description Framework

The RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a language for describing information and resources on the web.

Putting information into RDF files, makes it possible for computer programs (“web spiders”) to search, discover, pick up, collect, analyze and process information from the web.

The Semantic Web uses RDF to describe web resources.

If you want to learn more about RDF, please read our RDF tutorial.
How can it be used?

If information about music, cars, tickets, etc. were stored in RDF files, intelligent web applications could collect information from many different sources, combine information, and present it to users in a meaningful way.

Information like this:

* Car prices from different resellers
* Information about medicines
* Plane schedules
* Spare parts for the industry
* Information about books (price, pages, editor, year)
* Dates of events
* Computer updates

Can it be understood?

The Semantic Web is not a very fast growing technology.

One of the reasons for that is the learning curve. RDF was developed by people with academic background in logic and artificial intelligence. For traditional developers it is not very easy to understand.

One fast growing language for building semantic web applications is RSS. If you want to learn more about RSS, please read our RSS tutorial.

To downoad this add visit

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10359

If you have or are developing a WordPress plugin let me know.

OK ive found one – the guys at ARC have a plugin for WordPress enabling the use of SparQL which as far as  can work out allows you to query data. See http://arc.semsol.org/download

Well im not sure either but I thought I would start a blog so that I could find out. What i do know it has been conceived by Tim Berners-Lee widely known as the man who invented the Internet.

Lets get the Wikipedia definition to start with:

The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to “understand” and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.^[1][2] It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.^[3]

OK does that make sense? No

Lets have a look at a video