The Semantic Web Prof. Enrico Motta Knowledge Media Institute The Open University

The Semantic Web

Prof. Enrico MottaKnowledge Media Institute

The Open University

The World-Wide-Web

• Huge information space and computing infrastructure

• All the world knowledge and a huge number of services at your fingertips

• Easy to publish information/services

• Reasonable easy to locate resources (for humans - it is hard for machines)

The WWW Revolution

• Combination of ease of publishing, hugeness and removal of physical barriers implies revolutionary, disruptive, society-changing technology

• Examples– Napster– Baghdad blogger beats BBC,

CNN, etc…– Old lady in Yorkshire sets

up very successful business from isolated cottage…

– 17-year old kids become millionaires…etc, etc

So what next for the web?…

• Current web primarily for human consumption– Hard to locate resources

for machines– Hard to locate info across

web pages (for both humans and machines)

– published information not easily processable by machines

– Limited possibilities for large-scale interoperability and the provision of ‘smart’ functionalities

In a nutshell…

• There is so much information out there, but current technology can do very little with it

• And of course in the knowledge economy, access to the right information at the right time is a key competitive advantage

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KMi Semantic

Web

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Peter Scott Home Page

Conceptual Interoperablity







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The Semantic Web

• Huge, distributed markup

• Statements about web resources and entities in the world

• Formal, declarative, machine processable information

• Markup based on shared ontologies, to enable interoperability between agents (both human and software)

So What?

• Semantic Markup supports semantic search, based on meaning rather than keyword retrieval

• Shared ontologies allow ‘conceptual interoperability’

• Conceptual interoperability enables the discovery, aggregation and use of information coming from multiple sites

• Key is the use of formal, explicit, declarative, shared representations

Trends and Possibilities….

• Semantic web is not a fad…here to stay– Some visionary papers may seem a bit over the top but reality is that • Semantic web is growing more quickly than the web• Huge amounts of distributed semantic markup will become available within 3-5 years

• WWW has opened up huge new markets and removed geographical and marketing barriers

• Semantic web will be about automating processes and achieving novel smart functionalities by leveraging machine-processable contents

Example: Travel Industry

• Now: Expedia’s strategy is based on providing holiday packages customizations at no extra cost

• Future: Automatic travel agents interoperating in real time with huge numbers of heterogenous providers to provide custom-tailored travel packages

Example: Financial Sector

• Now: Portfolio creation, management and customization slow and expensive

• Future: Smart artificial brokers will outperform human brokers by being able to make use of large amounts of real-time data about financial products, environments and clients, to provide optimized, tailor-made financial portfolio for clients

Example: Music Industry

• Now: Digital music, ‘smart’ playlists, podcasting…

• Future: All music ever created available online and massively marked-up. Huge possibilities for intelligently customized radio stations, for automated clearance of copyrights, etc, etc..

Conclusions

• The semantic web is about producing massive amounts of distributed semantic annotations - making explicit and formal what is implicit and informal

• The availability of large scale semantic markup opens up the way for – Intelligent aggregation of information– Smart search engines able to reason about information coming from different sources, thus generating new knowledge

– Dynamic agent interoperability on the web– Intelligent personalization of information

Documents

The Semantic Web Prof. Enrico Motta Knowledge Media Institute The Open University