Semantic Web and Web 2.0

ABSTRACT

Currently, most of the websites are using the Web2.0 technology that has realized a goal of the web: Change the internet users from the viewers of the web content into the creators of the web content. Web 2.0 provides some functional tools like tag, bookmark and keyword-based search, but they are inadequate due to a lack of semantics. Semantic Web is a new web technology that can make natural language readable by the machines, namely, communication between people and computers has been becoming easier. We argue that these two technologies can integrate with each other to leverage each other’s advantages. This paper illustrates the current state of the semantic web and web 2.0, as well as contracts, comparing semantic web and web2.0 in some aspects.

Keywords

Web2.0; Blogging; Tagging; Semantic Web; Ontology; Integration

1.     INTRODUCTION

In our life, we use data (eg., photos, text) everyday and most of them are on the web. We can see the calendar online as well as we can see a digital article or photo created. But can we get seen that where, when we were and what we were doing at that time while we were seeing the photo online? Yes, Semantic Web can realise it. These data is locked in some applications, but these applications do not know the relation among these individuals. Semantic Web provides technology to lift the data into the web and create the information about data that enables machines to understand the semantic meaning of the natural language and connect them [6], so that computers and software agents can work more effective and intelligent. In this paper, Section II is a short introduction of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Section III mainly compares Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, discussing the weakness of Web 2.0 in the aspects of tagging system and blog. Section IV is about the evaluation and future development of the two web worlds respectively. Finally, the part is about the perspective of the integration of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

2.     WEB 2.0 & THE SEMANTIC WEB

2.1     Web2.0: a social phenomenon

Web2.0 includes the technologies of AJAX, web services and other methods that make the web content more interactive and flexible. In particular, this evolution enables users to interact with others by means of putting content on the websites. Web 2.0, ignited by successful Web 2.0-based social application such as Facebook, Youtube and MySpace that users can create micro blog or upload some multimedia files, and also including some functionalities such as page tagging, page scraping and social bookmarking [1].

2.2     Semantic Web: representation of data

The semantic web is a web about metadata. Initially, it encourages the creator of the website to create machine-readable metadata. Hence, the content of the web pages can be accessed by machines. On the Semantic Web, ontology language is used to represent web information and relation between web information. In ontology, a standard model language RDF (Resource Description Framework) is used for data interchange. Basically, the concept of RDF is the “triple”: any statement can be made by a subject, a predicate, and the object [2].  Based on RDF, the OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a stronger knowledge representation language with greater machine interpretability. As Tim Berners-Lee explained, the Semantic Web is about giving information a defined meaning so that people and machines can work in cooperation [3].

3.     WEB 2.0 VS THE SEMANTIC WEB

According to Internet monitoring firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com), currently the World Wide Web comprises more than 100 million web sites [4]. In addition, with the rapid development of Web 2.0 technology, any ordinary people can post web content via certain web site. Nevertheless, with the increase in the amount of resource available online, finding a way to manage and search by keywords is a bottleneck.  The semantic web is considered to address the problems by expressing web content in machine-processable forms that software agents can maintain more efficiently, thus enhancing search precision and enabling logical reasoning [4]. Following, the applications of the Semantic Web technology are discussed in the aspects of tagging system and blogging.

3.1     Semantic Tagging

In the digital world, a significant application is tagging system – a system enable users to add keywords to digital resource without relying on a controlled vocabulary, which has the potential to improve search, spam detection and reputation [5]. Tagging system is widely used in many systems that includes DOI and Digging, as well as some Web 2.0-based social sites like Furl, YouTube and Flickr. In these portals, the keyword-based tagging system exists in the web browsers. Just like a bookmark, tags allow users to select terms to describe their uploaded content (eg., photos, videos) on a certain web site, so that they can later retrieve them as well as share them with others having common interests [4]. However, the system does not understand the defined meaning of the tags, and keyword-based tags have the limitations of ambiguity. Namely, there exist relations that cluster tags referring to common resources [4]. For instances, images tagged as “cat” will not appear when a user searches for content associated with the tag “kitty”. Semantic Web technology can solve that problem by bringing the idea of the Semantic Web to tag clouds (a visual depiction of tags used on a website) [2, 6].  Moreover, in semantic web technology, people can add some description to their tags, which makes the tags more readable, informative, and easy to locate [2]. In addition, using the ontology technology can make the machine understand the relationships between objects. For example, when someone searches pictures tagged “animals”, the machine can identify that “cat” and “dog” are both animals and hence both show up.

3.2     Semantic Blogs

“Blogs” is a popular application associated with web 2.0 – internet users can write textual content which can embed in images and videos to express their thoughts and ideas of some topics [7]. Keyword-based tags are also applied in bogs, which makes it easy to classify and manage the blogging. So similarly, keyword-based search for blogs also has the limitations of ambiguity due to lack of semantic. Additionally, visitors can subscribe to a blog to be notified about new posts via syndication [4]. With syndication, the content of a web site is published in Really Simple Syndication (an XML-based format that special RSS readers or aggregators can read) [4]. With the Semantic Web unfolds, an idea generates – bring the blogging to the Semantic Web. Currently, most of the blogs have machine-readable content encoded in RSS, which allows users to add annotation to the bogs, and then publish these annotations so that other people can see them [8].With the tool such as Haystack which provides a semantic blogging environment, one approach is adding extensions to the current blog creation interface paradigm (one of the key parts of blogs) when producing machine-readable information for the benefits of blog content users [8]. In this model, using XSL transform to translate created RSS 9.0/.0 feeds into RDF [8]. In this method, Haystack provides specialized forms retrieving different level of semantics for representation automatically and enables users to publish such information using RSS 1.0 [8]. Actually, we cannot see the Semantic Web directly, but the Semantic Web technologies may run behind of the interface, which provides a better function [2].

4.     FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

The technology of semantic web is based on ontologies and machine processable metadata [9]. However, ontologies is usually controlled by experts so it is difficult to make adoption by a wide user, which results in Semantic Web architecture cannot be widely deployed [4]. In addition, only building ontologies and metadata is just a required key part of running the Semantic Web, because it is necessary to update and maintain the architecture to make sure the reasoning works correctly, which is time-consuming. In Web 2.0-based social web sites, folksonomies (a set of categories from tagging) have some characteristics like flexibility and adaptability, but they are lack of tag’s semantics and hierarchy, which results in ambiguous meaning [4].

With the development of the Semantic Web, one way has been researched and applied that folksonomies are used to bridge the gap between the Web 2.0 social web sites and the Semantic Web by using folksonomies’ collective categorization scheme as an initial knowledge base for constructing ontologies [4]. In this paradigm, some prototypes have been created such as Radar Networks that applies Semantic Web technologies to Social Web data [4]. In the future, the bogs may be completely encoded by semantics and would be an intelligent agent. For example, a semantic blog can notify people of events like lecture, meeting and etc [8].

5.     CONLUSION

Web 2.0 technologies provide an easy way to create internet content for any users, which is a significant revolution in a particular area – social networking. Hence, the emerging of the web content increasing results in the usage of folksonomy system which allows users to add keyword-based tags to classify the internet resource and share their content with others. With the characteristic of making machine access and read, semantic web technology can help add semantics to web resource, which will offer way to integrate data on the web. We should keep the successful points on Web 2.0 – lightweight, dynamic and simple, and then make the Web 2.0 “smart” by using Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is like an add-on to the current Web 2.0 that improves experience that users can create blogs and tags as usual with Web 2.0 interface, apply these folksonomies for the construction and evolution of ontologies and metadata, and provide Semantic Web better outcomes and services to people.

6.     REFERENCE

 

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2.             Agarwal, P.R., Semantic Web in Comparison to Web 2.0. 2012: p. 558-563.

3.             Berners-Lee, T., J. Hendler, and O. Lassila. The Semantic Web 2009  [cited 2013; Available from: www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21.

4.             Mikroyannidis, A., Toward a Social Semantic Web, in IEEE Intelligent Systems. 2007, IEEE Computer Society.

5.             Marlow, C., et al., HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article,ToRead. 2006. p. 31-40.

6.             Breslin, J. Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces. 2008  [cited 2013; Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/semantic-web-20-creating-social-semantic-information-spaces-378981.

7.             Hope, G., T. Wang, and S. Barkataki, Convergence of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web: A Semantic Tagging and Searching System for Creating and Searching Blogs. 2007: p. 201-208.

8.             Karger, D.R. and D. Quan, What would it mean to blog on the semantic web? Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 2005. 3(2-3): p. 147-157.

9.             Berners-Lee, T. Semantic Web - XML2000.  [cited 2013; Available from: http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/.

 

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/yufengli/p/3439663.html