Semantic technology

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Simplistic example of the sort of semantic net used in Semantic Web technology SemanticNetExample.jpg
Simplistic example of the sort of semantic net used in Semantic Web technology

The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF (Resource Description Framework) [1] and OWL (Web Ontology Language). [2] These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.

Contents

Overview

In software, semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code. This enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason with them at execution time. With semantic technologies, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these programs share.

With traditional information technology, on the other hand, meanings and relationships must be predefined and "hard wired" into data formats and the application program code at design time. This means that when something changes, previously unexchanged information needs to be exchanged, or two programs need to interoperate in a new way, the humans must get involved.

Off-line, the parties must define and communicate between them the knowledge needed to make the change, and then recode the data structures and program logic to accommodate it, and then apply these changes to the database and the application. Then, and only then, can they implement the changes.

Semantic technologies are "meaning-centered". They involve but are not limited to the following areas of application:

Given a question, semantic technologies can directly search topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources.

Semantic technologies provide an abstraction layer above existing IT technologies that enables bridging and interconnection of data, content, and processes. Second, from the portal perspective, semantic technologies can be thought of as a new level of depth that provides far more intelligent, capable, relevant, and responsive interaction than with information technologies alone. Semantic technologies would often leverage natural language processing and machine learning in order to extract topics, concepts, and associations between concepts in text.

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic Web</span> Extension of the Web to facilitate data exchange

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The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Topic map</span> Knowledge organization system

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RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema, variously abbreviated as RDFS, RDF(S), RDF-S, or RDF/S) is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies. It uses various forms of RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF resources. RDF and RDFS can be saved in a triplestore, then one can extract some knowledge from them using a query language, like SPARQL.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge graph</span> Type of knowledge base

In knowledge representation and reasoning, a knowledge graph is a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model or topology to represent and operate on data. Knowledge graphs are often used to store interlinked descriptions of entities – objects, events, situations or abstract concepts – while also encoding the semantics or relationships underlying these entities.

References

  1. "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), "RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)", 10 Feb. 2004".
  2. "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), "OWL Web Ontology Language Overview", W3C Recommendation, 10 Feb. 2004".

Further reading