REFERENCES

1. V.R. Benjamins, J. Contreras, O. Corcho, A. Gomez-Perez, Six Challenges for the Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Semantic Web Conference 2002.
2. T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila, "The Semantic Web," Scientific Am., May 2001.
3. L. Ding, L. Zhou, T. Finin, A. Joshi, How the Semantic Web is Being Used: An Analysis of FOAF Documents. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 03-06 Jan. 2005 Page(s):113c - 113c.
4. O. Lassila, J. Hendler, "Embracing "Web 3.0"," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 90-93, May/Jun, 2007.
5. R. MacManus, Eric Schmidt Defines Web 3.0, ReadWriteWeb, August 7, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/eric_schmidt_defines_web_30.php on April 22nd 2008.
6. N. Spivack, The Third-Generation Web is Coming, KurzweilAI.net, December 17, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0689.html?m%3D3 on April 22nd, 2008.
7. A Toffler (1970). Future Shock, Bantam Books, 1970.
8. Wikipedia (2008) Internet Map. Retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg on April 22^nd, 2008.
9. W3C (2008) Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ on April 28th, 2008.
10. W3C (2008) Semantic Web Road Map. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html on April 28th, 2008.
11. Wikipedia (2008) Semantic Web. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web on April 28^th, 2008.
12. W3C (2008) Resource Description Framework (RDF). Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/RDF on April 30th, 2008.
13. W3 schools (2008). Retrieved from http://www.w3schools.com/rdf on April 26th 2008.
14. P. Champin, RDF Tutorial, April 04, 2005. Retrieved from http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~champin/rdf-tutorial/ on April 30th, 2008.
15. E. Miller, An Introduction to the Resource Description Framework, D-Lib Magazin, May 1998. Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html on April 29th, 2008.
16. Wikipedia (2008) Resource Description Framework. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework on April 28th, 2008.
17. Wikipedia (2008) Web Ontology Language. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language on April 28th, 2008.
18. The RDF.net Challenge, May 21, 2005. Retrieved from http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet on April 27th, 2008.
19. W3C (2008) RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised). Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/#example7 on April 29th, 2008.
20. Wikipedia (2008) Ramanathan V. Guha. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanathan_V._Guha on April 28th, 2008.
21. W3C (2008) OWL Web Ontology Language. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ on April 30th, 2008.
22. G. Schreiber, The making of a Web Ontology Language a chair's perspective, March 12, 2004. Retrieved from http://www.cs.vu.nl/~guus/public/2004-webont-zeist/all.htm on April 31st, 2008.
23. P. Krill, OWL files as Web ontology Language, August 19, 2003. Retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/19/HNowl_1.html on May 1st, 2008.
24. W3C (2008) Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/ on May 1st, 2008
25. David Beckett, Modernising Semantic Web Markup, April 18-21 2004. Retrieved from http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xmle04/papers/03-08-03/03-08-03.html on May 1st, 2008
26. Tim Berners-Lee, Notation 3, March 9, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3 on May 2nd, 2008
27. W3C (2008) Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/ on May 3rd, 2008.
28. W3C (2008) RDF Semantics. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/ on May 3rd, 2008.
29. W3C (2000) Primer - Getting into RDF and Semantic Web using N3. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer.html on May 3rd, 2008
30. Edutech Wiki (2008), RDF. Retrieved from http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/RDF on May 3rd, 2008.

 

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Problems

• -The XML syntax for RDF is too verbose.
• -The triple (R,P,V) notation is not expressive enough.
• -RDFs ability to reify statements is handled ambiguously.
• -It has not WOWed the world even with fierce backing from Tim Berners-Lee, who sees RDF as a key foundation component for the Semantic Web.
• -The RDF-the-idea is better than RDF the actual technology.

The above problems (Wikipedia 2008, The RDF.net Challenge 2003).

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Importance and early adopters

 

Why OWL is important:

-It allows richer integration and interoperability of data across application boundaries.

-It enables applications such as Web portal management and multimedia collections that cannot respond to English language based search tools, Web services and ubiquitous computing.

-It is playing an important role in an increasing and range of applications and is the focus of research into tools, reasoning techniques, formal foundations and language extensions.

 

 

Early adopters:

-Bioinformatics

-Medical communities

-Corporate enterprise

-Governments

 

Importance and Early Adopters (P. Krill 2003)

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History

 

OWL came about in the mid to late 1990s. A number of research efforts explored how the idea of knowledge representation (KR) from Artificial intelligence (AI) could be made useful on the World Wide Web (Wikipedia 2008).

 

Included languages based on:

-HyperText Markup Language (HTML) called Simple HTML Ontology Extensions (SHOE)

-Extensible Markup Language (XML) called XOL, later Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language (OIL),

-Various frame-based KR languages

-Knowledge acquisition approaches

 

Sublanguages:

-OWL Lite: less expressive logic

-OWL DL: based in part on the description logic and also on a number of earlier KR systems known as frame-based systems.

-OWL Full: operates outside the bounds of Description Logic, allowing more power and expressivity and having less constraints on use, but at the cost of decidability.

· OWL Full’s semantics is based on the Semantics of RDF) OWL is encoded in RDF/XML documents.

 

 

Languages and sublanguages descriptions/definitions (Wikipedia 2008, G. Schreiber 2004 and W3C OWL 2008).

 

The OWL Language is a research based revision of the DAML+OIL web ontology language incorporating learnings from the design and application us of DAML+OIL. Originally DAML+OIL was developed by a group called the “US/UK ad hoc Joint Working Group on Agent Markup Languages”. This was also jointly funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program and the European Union (EU) Information Society Technologies (IST) funding project (Wikipedia 2008).

 

On November 1, 2001 the W3C created the “Web Ontology Working Group” chaired by James Hendler and Guus Shreiber which worked on the frrst drafts of the abstract syntax, reference and synopsis. The first publications of OWL came around in July 2002 and it formalized to become a W3C standard on February 10, 2004 (Wikipedia 2008).

 

 

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OWL in RDF/XML syntax 

<owl:Class rdf:ID="MozartDaPonteOpera">

 <owl:equivalentClass>

  <owl:Class>

   <owl:oneOf rdf:parseType="Collection">

    <Opera rdf:about="#NozzDiFigaro"/>

    <Opera rdf:about="#DonGiovanni"/>

    <Opera rdf:about="#CosiFanTutte"/>

   </owl:oneOf>

  </owl:Class>

 </owl:equivalentClass>

</owl:Class>

Sample syntax (G. Schreiber 2004). 

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Ontology

 

Defined by Merriam-Websters: Ontology

1 : a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being

2 : a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence

 

Defined by Wikipedia: Ontology

1 : is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. In philosophy, ontology is the study of being or existence and forms the basic subject matter of metaphysics. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. It is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of the objects, properties and relations in every area of reality.

 

As for the web the ontology is about the exact description of web information and relationships between web information (W3 schools 2008).

 

 

 

OWL Ontologies:

Collection of information

-Information about classes

Examples: person, pet, objects, or things

-Information about properties

Examples: has_mom, has_pet, service_number, or object

-a collection of relationships between individuals and data

-a way of describing a kind of relationship between individuals

Ontology ([name] …)

Ontologies can include (import) information fro mother ontologies

-Ontology ([name] owl:imports() …)

 

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What is OWL?

Web Ontology Language (OWL) is for processing information on the web which is the exact description of the web information and their relationships between web information. It is built on top of RDF. It is also written in XML for simplification of communication between different types of computers with different operating systems and / or application languages. OWL is designed to provide a common way to process the content of the web information so it can be read and understood by computer applications and it is not designed for being displayed to people on the web. Also, OWL is also part of the W3C’s Semantic Web Activity: Web information has exact meaning, Web information can be understood and processed by computers, and computers can integrate information from the web. OWL pretty much will have almost all the characteristics of RDF but it is a sturdy and more robust language with greater machine interpretability than RDF. It has a larger vocabulary and stronger syntax than RDF. OWL falls into the same W3C standard which is the W3C recommendation for the web communities (Wikipedia 2008, W3 schools 2008 and W3C OWL 2008).

Looking at OWL and the three sublanguages:

• OWL Lite – supports those users primarily needing a classification hierarchy and simple constraint features. For example, while OWL Lite supports cardinality constraints, it only permits cardinality values of 0 or 1. It should be simpler to provide tool support for OWL Lite than its more expressive relatives, and provide a quick migration path for thesauri and other taxonomies.
• OWL DL (includes OWL Lite) - supports those users who want the maximum expressiveness without losing computational completeness (all entailments are guaranteed to be computed) and decidability (all computations will finish in finite time) of reasoning systems. OWL DL includes all OWL language constructs with restrictions such as type separation (a class can not also be an individual or property, a property can not also be an individual or class). OWL DL is so named due to its correspondence with description logics [Description Logics], a field of research that has studied a particular decidable fragment of first order logic. OWL DL was designed to support the existing Description Logic business segment and has desirable computational properties for reasoning systems.
• OWL Full (includes OWL DL) - is meant for users who want maximum expressiveness and the syntactic freedom of RDF with no computational guarantees. For example, in OWL Full a class can be treated simultaneously as a collection of individuals and as an individual in its own right. Another significant difference from OWL DL is that a owl:DatatypeProperty can be marked as an owl:InverseFunctionalProperty. OWL Full allows an ontology to augment the meaning of the pre-defined (RDF or OWL) vocabulary. It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support every feature of OWL Full.

The 3 definitions above (W3C OWL 2008).

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Rules

 

There are rules to follow in RDF. When using RDF there are resources which are identified by web identifiers, Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). This URI is used to idnetify resources which can be used over a network, typically the World Wide Web (P. Champin 2005). These resources make up the a subject-predicate-object expressions, called triples in RDF terminology. The triples are also called: Resource, Property, Value (R,P,V). Resources have Properties, which are identified by URIs. Properties have Values, which can be strings or numbers or Resources (Wikipedia 2008 and The RDF.net Challenge 2003).

 

Explanation of (R,P,V):

• Resource can be identified by or have a URI

Example: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework”

• Property can be identified by a Resource that has a name

Example: “homepage” or an “author”

• Value can be identified by the value of a Property

Example: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page” or “Jane Doe”

-Note: the value does not have to be the same Resource

 

Sample code that could describe the resource for “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework”:

 

 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF>
  <Description about="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework/RDF">
    <author>Jane Doe</author>
    <homepage>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>
  </Description>
</RDF> >    

The above sample syntax and explanation (W3 schools 2008). 

 

 

 

Additional explanation by subject-predicate-object:

-Subject denotes the Resource

-Predicate denotes traits or aspects of the Resource and expresses a relationship between the subject and the object (Wikipedia (2008).

 

Example:

One way to represent the notion "The sky has the color blue" in RDF is as the triple: a subject denoting "the sky", a predicate denoting "has the color", and an object denoting "blue" (Wikipedia 2008).

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Research Proposal

In this research we focus on the underlying technologies that are fostering Web 3.0. In order to understand how these technologies will integrate with existing Web 2.0 technologies and what possibilities they will offer different industries including education, business, government and health. Understanding how these technologies are quickly fusing with existing knowledge sets and what applications are available will foster the greater adoption of Web 3.0 applications bridging the enormous gap between available knowledge and mining these tremendous information sets.

In this research we focus on the semantic and media-centric aspects of Web 3.0. Our end goals of our research will be to discuss and evaluate the existing technologies as well as the technologies under development to change the semantics and annotation of the web.

Finally, we will look at how these changes will bring about new media and how the web's organization and search ability will be improved and modified. Evaluating the potential ontologies and tools to implement these technologies in the Semantic web 3.0. Compare and contrast the ontologies in development and the methods used to implement them. What are their benefits and disadvantages. We will examine the current trends in 3.0 and identify the major academic and commercial contributions to date.

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What is RDF?

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for describing resources on the web. It provides a model for data and syntax so that independent parties can exchange and use it. RDF is designed to provide a common way to describe information so it can be read and understood by computer applications and it is not designed for being displayed to people on the web (Wikipedia 2008, W3 schools 2008 and W3C RDF 2008). RDF is written in Extensible Markup Language (XML). The specific type is called RDF/XML. This allows RDF information to be exchanged easily by different types of computers with different operating systems and / or application languages. Furthermore, RDF is also part of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)s Semantic Web Activity: Web information has exact meaning, Web information can be understood and processed by computers, and computers can integrate information from the web. To add, RDF is W3C recommendation. The recommendation is understood by the industry and the web community as a web standard (Wikipedia 2008, W3 schools 2008 and W3C RDF 2008).

 

Examples of Use:

• Describing properties for shopping items, such as price and availability
• Describing time schedules for web events
• Describing information about web pages, such as content, author, created and modified date
• Describing content and rating for web pictures
• Describing content for search engines
• Describing electronic libraries

Examples listed (W3 schools 2008)

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