Intro to the Semantic Web

A short introduction to the semantic web. All source material is on the Digital Bazaar wiki: http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/semantic-web-intro

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• semantic
• web
• rdfa
• microformats
• manu
• sporny

[Aintaer]

The semantic web assumes that the participants in it will mark up the proper content without inaccuracies or worse, lies. You would still have to filter out the chaff, but this time through your semantic technologies. Since the production and consumption of the "semantic web' content is still by humans, it provides no additional value in the end.

[msporny]

@Aintaer The semantic web does not assume proper content. It assumes inaccuracies, lies, vagueness and all of the other things that humans deal with every day. When we talk about "statements" on the semantic web - we talk in terms of "claims", not "facts". One website can claim things about you, another can claim a different set of things (possibly contradictory). The important thing is that we have a way of dealing with these contradictions... that's the job of software called "Reasoners"

[Aintaer]

@msporny Then haven't you simply pushed the problem one level up? Reasoners can only resolve semantic conflicts through policies set by the users. At every junction, user interaction is still necessary in order to extract relevant meaning from the corpus. I see 2 problems: first that the system does not introduce enough additional value to justify the extra effort necessary from the content producers; second that there is no universal semantic given how semantics themselves change with contexts.

[msporny]

@Aintaer re: 1) No, see one of the biggest problems was being able to generate this type of data that could be reasoned over. Before RDFa - there was no standard, scalable way of doing so in Web pages. re: 2) Content producers are embracing the semantic web /today/ because it is in their best interest - look up Drupal 7/Google Rich Snippets/RDFa/etc. and how it's affecting SEO. re: 3) Exactly right - context matters and is why Reasoners have the concept of a context in which they are reasoning.

[warkarma]

So basically, computer is going to search and download everything with same tag and display it. However it is not going to check if it's a virus or ads. Do you imagine how many Viruses and Trojans are going to be copied and pasted to PC’s? It’s going to be a doomsday :D. Thanks, but no, I will do my homework of searching what I like by myself.

[msporny]

@warkarma All of the current semantic web technologies protect against viruses, trojans or other nasty security vulnerabilities. They don't download anything to your computer without your authorization. Check out Google RichSnippets to see what the semantic web looks like right in practice.

[msporny]

Comic Sans is a fundamental corner stone of the semantic web :)

[ttk1opc]

So the semantic web will still include Comic Sans?

[ThePuddleme]

Very helpful - cheers :)

[stowsta]

The beginning of Cybernet......

[mynamesfake2]

"Quick"

[keif347]

thanks man this was really helpful

[sheepblitzer]

the ultimate conundrum which blows all semantics out of the water is: how do you type/write the sound that the Fonz makes? "YOOOOOOOH" .....nope, that aint it

[Coavantia]

Thanks for this explanation , this is the best way to understand the semantic web,then we can start with understand the meaning of web ontology and the reasoning

[knuckleskin]

Great video, explained it pretty well. But what's bugging me is what did you use to create it? It looked like you drew on the slides with a real pen.

[IrregularMango]

It seems like a good move towards making the web more meaningful, but ultimately it will be the need to use semantics for SEO that drives adoption rather than the semantics utility being needed. Adding semantics to web content seems like we're having to cater for machines, rather than having machines understand content.