SEMANTIC WEB

Module 1
CONTENTS ( SYLLABUS)
 The Future of the Internet:
 Introduction
 The Syntactic Web
 The Semantic Web
 How the Semantic Web Will Work.

 Ontology in Computer Science

 Defining the Term Ontology
 Differences among Taxonomies Thesauri and Ontologies

 Classifying Ontologies
 Web Ontologies
 Web Ontology Description Languages
2
 Ontology - Categories and Intelligence.
THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
Introduction
The Syntactic Web
The Semantic Web
How the Semantic Web Will Work.

3
WHERE WE ARE TODAY: THE SYNTACTIC WEB

[Hendler & Miller 02]

 THE SYNTACTIC WEB IS…
 A hypermedia, a digital library
 A library of documents called (web pages) interconnected by a
hypermedia of links
 A database, an application platform
 A common portal to applications accessible through web pages, and
presenting their results as web pages
 A platform for multimedia
 BBC Radio 4 anywhere in the world! Terminator 3 trailers!
 A naming scheme
 Unique identity for those documents
A place where computers do the presentation (easy) and people
do the linking and interpreting (hard).
Why not get computers to do more of the hard work?
5

[Goble 03]
 IMPOSSIBLE(?) VIA
THE SYNTACTIC WEB…

 Complex queries involving background knowledge

 Find information about “animals that use sonar but are not either
bats or dolphins”
 Locating information in data repositories
 Travel enquiries
 Prices of goods and services
 Results of human genome experiments

 Finding and using “web services”

 Visualise surface interactions between two proteins
 Delegating complex tasks to web “agents”
 Book me a holiday next weekend somewhere warm, not too far
away, and where they speak French or English 6
 WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

• Consider a typical web page: • Markup consists of:

– rendering information (e.g.,
font size and colour)
– Hyper-links to related
content
• Semantic content is accessible
to humans but not (easily) to
computers…
• Most documents on the Web
not only contain text
- also immense amount of
images, sounds, video and
other multimedia files
- these files are
7
meaningless to computers.
 WHAT INFORMATION CAN WE SEE…

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Speakers confirmed
Tim berners-lee
8
 WHAT INFORMATION CAN A MACHINE SEE…

WWW2002
The eleventh international world wide web conference
Sheraton waikiki hotel
Honolulu, hawaii, USA
7-11 may 2002
1 location 5 days learn interact
Registered participants coming from
australia, canada, chile denmark, france, germany, ghana, hong kong, india,
ireland, italy, japan, malta, new zealand, the netherlands, norway,
singapore, switzerland, the united kingdom, the united states, vietnam,
zaire
Register now
On the 7th May Honolulu

9
 SEMANTIC WEB
 Semantic Web will overcome such the problems by
making the Web not only human-understandable but
also machine-understandable.
 Semantic Web is a vision of information that is
understandable by computers, so that they can
perform more of the tedious works involved in
finding, sharing, and combining information on the
Web.

10
 Tim
Berners-Lee expressed the vision of the
Semantic Web as follows:
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become
capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links,
and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic
Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but
when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy,
and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to
machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages
will finally materialize.

11
 SEMANTIC WEB
 It derives from W3C1 director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision
of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and
knowledge exchange.

 The word semantics stand for the meaning of. The

semantics of something is the meaning of something.

 The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in

a way that computers can understand.

12
1. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is a forum for information, commerce, communication,
and collective understanding. W3C was founded in Oct. 1994.
 SEMANTIC WEB (CONT’D)
 Statements are built with syntax rules
 The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language
statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

 This is what the Semantic Web is all about:

 Describing things in a way that computer applications can
understand.
 The Semantic Web is not about links between Web pages.
 The Semantic Web describes the relationships among things (e.g.,
A is a part of B and Y is a member of  Z) and the properties of
things (e.g., size, weight, age, and price).

13
 SEMANTIC WEB (CONT’D)
 Semantic Web (SW), proposed by W3C, is one of the most
promising and accepted approaches to make the Web
content becomes more machine-readable so that intelligent
agents can retrieve and process information readily [Dong
and Dan 05].

 TheSW is a vision of the next generation of the WWW in

which information is given well-defined meaning
understandable by machines as well as humans [Lei 05].

14
 SEMANTIC WEB: SOME DEFINITIONS
 The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the
current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning,
better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation
(Berners-Lee, Hendlers, J. & Lassila, O., 2001)
 “The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the Web
defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just
for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of
data across various applications (W3C, 2003)
 “Soon it will be possible to access the Web resources by content
rather than just by keywords (Anutariya et al, 2001)

15
SEMANTIC WEB (SW): DEFINITIONS

 “The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having

data on the Web defined and linked in a way that it
can be used by machines not just for display
purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse
of data across various applications (W3C, 2003)
 “Soon it will be possible to access the Web resources
by content rather than just by keywords (Anutariya
et al, 2001)

16
 A SEMANTIC WEB — FIRST STEPS

 Extend existing rendering markup with semantic markup

 Metadata annotations that describe content/function of web
accessible resources
 Use Ontologies to provide vocabulary for annotations
 “Formal specification” is accessible to machines

 A prerequisite is a standard web ontology language

 Need to agree common syntax before we can share semantics
 Syntactic web based on standards such as HTTP and HTML

17
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB?

 Knowledge Management
 Withthe large number of documents made available online by
organizations, several document management systems have
entered the market. However, these systems have severe
weaknesses [Fensel et al. 03]:
 Searching information: Existing keyword-based search retrieves
irrelevant information that uses keyword in a context other than the one
in which the searcher is interested.
 Extracting information: Human browsing and reading is currently

required to extract relevant information from information sources, as

automatic agents lack the common sense knowledge required to extract
such information from textual representations and fail to integrate
information spread over different sources.
18
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB?
(CONT’D)

 Maintenance: Maintaining weakly-structured text sources is a difficult

and time-consuming activity when such sources become large.
 Automatic document generation: Adaptive Web sites that enable a

dynamic reconfiguration of information according to user profiles or

other relevant aspects would be very useful.

 Semantic Web technology will enable structural and semantic

definitions of documents providing completely new possibilities:
 Intelligent search instead of keyword matching.
 Query answering instead of information retrieval.

 Document exchange among departments via ontology

mapping.

19
 WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB?
(CONT’D)

 Web Commerce
 Very early on in B2C (Business to Customer) development, shopbots
were developed that visit several stores, extract product information,
and present to the customer an instant market overview.
 Their functionality is provided via wrappers written for each online
store. Such wrappers use a keyword search together with
assumptions on regularities in the presentation format of stores’ Web
sites and text extraction heuristics, to find information about the
requested product and return it to the customer.

20
WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR THE SEMANTIC WEB?
(CONT’D)

 Web Commerce (Cont’d)

 However, this technology has two severe limitations:
 Effort: Writing a wrapper for each online store is a
time-consuming activity, and changes in the layout
of stores may result in high levels of required
maintenance to keep the wrappers up-to-date.
 Quality: The product information extracted by

shopbots using such technology is limited (mostly

price information), error prone, and incomplete.
 For example, a wrapper may extract the direct

price of product but miss indirect costs such as

shipping, or discount.
21
HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?

 In order to organize Web content, AI researchers proposed a

series of conceptual models.
 The central idea is to categorize information in a standard
way.
 Similar to the solution used to classify living beings
 Biologists use a well-defined taxonomy. Likewise, computer
scientists are looking for similar model to help structure Web
content

22
 Themes related to the Semantic Web [Breitman et al. 07]

• Metadata
Concepts • Ontologies
• Ontology Languages
• Web Services

Semantic
Web

Applications Technologies
• Methodologies for
• Software agents
Ontology development
• Semantic desktop • Tools for Ontology
• Geospatial semantic web 23
development
• Ontology sources
HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?

Metadata
Metadata is “data about data”
They serve to index Web pages and Web sites in
the Semantic Web
Allowing other computers to acknowledge what
a Web page is about

24
HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?

Ontologies
In computer science, ontologies were adopted in
AI to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse
[Fensel 01]
Becoming widespread in areas:
 Intelligent information integration
 Cooperative information systems

 Agent-based software engineering

 E-commerce
25
 How Will the Semantic Web Work?
 Ontologies

Sample ontology of a Computer Science Department [Doan et al. 03] 26

HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?

Ontology Languages
Designed to define ontologies
They are sometimes called:
 Lightweight ontology languages
 Web-based ontology languages

 Markup ontology languages

RDF(Resource Description Language)

OWL (Web Ontology Language)

27
HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?

Web Services
Web services will be greatly improved if
semantics is added to the present Web resources
Computer will be able to:
 Make doctor appointments
 Synchronize with our agenda

 Find new suppliers for products we consume

 Make travel arrangements

28
TOOLS FOR ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

KAON from AIFB and FZI at the University of Karlsruhe http://kaon.semanticweb.org/

OilEd from University of Manchester http://oiled.man.ac.uk/

Ontolingua from KSL (Stanford University) http://www-ksl.stanford.edu

OntoSaurus from ISI (USA) http://www.isi.edu/isd/ontosaurus.html

OntoEdit from Karlsrhue Univ. http://ontoserver.aifb.unikarlsruhe.de/ontoedit/

Protégé from SMI (Stanford University) http://protege.stanford.edu/

WebOnto from KMI (Open University) http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/webonto/

29
WebODE from UPM http://webode.dia.fi.upm.es/webODE/
 Themes related to the Semantic Web [Breitman et al. 07]

• Metadata
Concepts • Ontologies
• Ontology Languages
• Web Services

Semantic
Web

Applications Technologies
• Methodologies for
• Software agents
Ontology development
• Semantic desktop • Tools for Ontology
• Geospatial semantic web 30
development
• Ontology sources
HOW WILL THE SEMANTIC WEB WORK?
 Applications of Semantic Web
 Personal Agent in Semantic Web
 Responsible for capturing user preferences, searching for
information on available resources, etc. to provide answer
that meet a user’s query
 Semantic desktop application
 Ontology applications in Art
 Cataloguing online cultural heritage or online museums
 The Hermitage Museum Web site
www.hermitagemuseum.org

31
ONTOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Defining the Term Ontology

Differences among Taxonomies Thesauri
and Ontologies

32
 ONTOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

 Humans use their language (natural language: NL) to

communicate and to create models of world.

 Natural
languages are not suitable for building models in
computer science, because they are too ambiguous.

 Therefore, Formal Language are used to specify models of the

world.
 Ex) Mathematics
 Ex) Best known formal language – First-Order Logic (FOL)

33
 ONTOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
 Formal Languages (FL : FOL)
 Have strict mathematical definitions
 Defined as a (possibly infinite) set of strings.

 Each string is a concatenation of terminal symbols, sometimes called

words.

 Natural Languages (NL : Korean)

 Have no strict definition but are used by a community of speakers.

 Grammar
 A finite set of rules that specifies a language
 FL have an official grammar, specified in manuals or books.

 NL have no official grammar, but linguists strive to discover properties

of the language by a process of scientific inquiry and then to codify their

discoveries in a grammar. 34

Artificial Intelligence- A Modern Approach, 2nd Edition, by Russell, S., and Norvig,
P., 1995, Prentice Hall, pp. 791-792
ONTOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

 Formal Languages
 A finite set of signs (alphabet) and a finite set of production rules (grammar)
produces an infinite set of expressions or sentences that define the
language.

 Producing a syntactic correct language does not mean that one has
captured the meaning and sense of the sentences of a given language.

 Ontology
 Ontology means to bridge the “semantic gap” existing between the actual
syntactic representation of information (symbol) and its conceptualization
(concept).

 Sharing or reusing knowledge across systems becomes difficult, as different35

systems use different terms for describing information.
 ONTOLOGY IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
 Thus Ontology describes a formal specification of a certain domain:
 Shared understanding of a domain of interest
 Formal and machine manipulatable model of a domain of interest

A more formal definition is:

“An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization”

(Tom Gruber)

 “explicit” means that “the type of concepts used and the constraints on their
use are explicitly defined”;
 “formal” refers to the fact that “it should be machine readable”;
 “shared” refers to the fact that the knowledge represented in an ontology
are agreed upon and accepted by a group”;
 “conceptualization” refers to an abstract model that consists the relevant
concepts and the relationships that exists in a certain situation
36
 ONTOLOGY

The basis of ontology is CONCEPTUALIZATION.

Consider the following: The conceptualization consists of

 the identified concepts (objects, events, beliefs, etc)
 E.g. Concepts: disease, symptoms, therapy
 the conceptual relationships that are assumed to exist and to be relevant.
 E.g. Relationships:
 “disease causes symptoms”, “therapy treats disease”

 Ontology is a term borrowed from philosophy that refers to the

science of describing the kinds of entities in the world and how
they are related. [OWL Guide - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-guide]

 Ontologies are used to capture knowledge about some domain of

interest. An ontology describes the concepts in the domain and 37
also the relationships that hold between those concepts.
[ http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/tutorials/protegeowltutorial/ resources/ ProtegeOWLTutorialP4_v1_2]
 ONTOLOGY
Ontology comes from: Ontos (greek)= Being + Logos=Word
An ontology is "the specification of conceptualizations, used to help
programs and humans share knowledge."

An ontology is a set of concepts - such as things, events, and relations

that are specified in some way in order to create an agreed-upon
vocabulary for exchanging information. (Tom Gruber, an AI
specialist at Stanford University.)

Ontologies establish a joint terminology between members of a

community of interest. These members can be human or automated
agents.
38
 ONTOLOGY
 In information management and knowledge sharing
arena, ontology can be defined as follows:

 An ontology is a vocabulary of concepts and relations rich

enough to enable us to express knowledge and intention without
semantic ambiguity.

 Ontologies should provide descriptions for

 Classes (things) in the various domains
 Relationships among things

 Properties of these things

39
 ONTOLOGY

 Ontologies should satisfy certain demands:

 Expressivity: domains should be described
 Consistency: it should not give contradictory
information
 It should support reasoning processes

 Ontologies are useful in sharing and exchanging

information between software agents
 Ontologies do not necessarily reflect the human way of
thinking of how knowledge is classified
 Ontologies should therefore not be seen as a reflection
of human intelligence
40
 WORLD WITHOUT ONTOLOGY = AMBIGUITY
EXAMPLE

Ambiguity for computer

Rice?
InternationalRice Research Institute
Rice Research Program
Rice Carrier Service Center
Africa Rice Center
Rice University

Cook?
You mean
chef
information about how to cook something,
or simply a place, person, business or some other entity with "cook" in its name.

The problem is that the word “rice“ or “cook” has no meaning, 41

or semantic content, to the computer.
 MOTIVATION (1)
The reason for ontologies becoming so important is that
currently we lack standards (shared knowledge) which are
rich in semantics and represented in machine understandable
form.
Ying Ding, Ontoweb

Ontologies have been proposed to solve the problems that

arise from using different terminology to refer to the same
concept or using the same term to refer to different concepts.
Howard Beck and Helena Sofia Pinto

42
 MOTIVATION (2)
Inability to use the abundant information resources on the web
The WEB has tremendous collection of useful information however getting information
from the web is difficult.
Search engines are restricted to simple keyword based techniques. Interpretation of
information contained in web documents is left to the human user.

Difficulty in Information Integration

The integration of data from various sources is a challenging task because of synonyms
and homonyms.

Problem in Knowledge Management

Multi-actor scenario involved in distributed information production and management.
“People as well as machines can‘t share knowledge if they do not speak a common
language [T. Davenport]

Ontologies provide the required conceptualizations and knowledge

representation to meet these challenges.

43
 MOTIVATION (3)
Database-style queries are effective

 Find red cars, 1993 or newer, < $5,000

 Select * From Car Where Color=“red” And Year >= 1993 And

Price < 5000

Web is not a database

 Uses keyword search
 Retrieves documents, not records

Ontologies provide the required knowledge and representation to search

the web in a database fashion through implicit Boolean search.
44
 WHY DEVELOP AN ONTOLOGY?

 To share common understanding of the structure of

descriptive information
– among people
– among software agents
– between people and software
 To enable reuse of domain knowledge

– to avoid “re-inventing the wheel”

– to introduce standards to allow interoperability

45
 BENEFITS OF ONTOLOGY

• To facilitate communications among people and organisations

 aid to human communication and shared understanding by specifying meaning

• To facilitate communications among systems with out semantic ambiguity. i,e

to achieve inter-operability

• To provide foundations to build other ontologies (reuse)

• To save time and effort in building similar knowledge systems (sharing)

• To make domain assumptions explicit

 Ontological analysis
 clarifies the structure of knowledge
 allow domain knowledge to be explicitly defined and described

46
 APPLICATION AREAS OF ONTOLOGIES
 Information Retrieval
 As a tool for intelligent search through inference mechanism instead
of keyword matching
 Easy retrievability of information without using complicated Boolean
logic
 Cross Language Information Retrieval
 Improve recall by query expansion through the synonymy relations
 Improve precision through Word Sense Disambiguation
(identification of the relevant meaning of a word in a given context
among all its possible meanings)
 Information Integration
 Seamless integration of information from different websites and
databases
 Natural Language Processing
 Better machine translation
 Queries using natural language

47
 APPLICATION AREAS OF ONTOLOGIES

 Digital Libraries
 Building dynamical catalogues from machine readable meta data
 Automatic indexing and annotation of web pages or documents with
meaning
 To give context based organisation (semantic clustering) of
information resources
 Site organization and navigational support
 Knowledge Engineering and Management
 As a knowledge management tools for selective semantic access
(meaning oriented access)
 Guided discovery of knowledge

48
THESAURI AND ONTOLOGY SIMILARITIES
 Both serve the same purpose, namely to provide a shared conceptualisation about a
specific part of the world to different users in order to facilitate an efficient
communication of complex knowledge.

 Both disciplines are based on concept systems representing highly complex knowledge
independent of any language.

 Both are concerned about covering a broad range of terminology used in a particular
domain, and in understanding the relationships among these terms.

 Both utilize a hierarchical organization to group terms into categories and subcategories.

 Both can be applied to cataloguing and organizing information.

49
THESAURI AND ONTOLOGY DIFFERENCES

 Formality of the definition:

 Thesauri uses text in natural language to define the meaning of terms. The correct
interpretation of the intended meaning depends on the user.
 Ontologies specify conceptual knowledge explicitly using a formal language with
clear semantics, which allows an unambiguous interpretation of terms.
 Computational support:
 The available tools are quite different for thesauri and ontologies.
 Most thesauri maintenance tools provide limited or no means for an explicit
representation of knowledge.
 Ontology maintenance tools provide systems with powerful knowledge
representation languages and inference mechanisms that allow formal consistency
checks, inference of new knowledge, and a more user-friendly interaction.
 Users:
 Thesauri are intended for human users, where domain experts constitute the
major user group.
 Ontologies are mainly developed for knowledge sharing between (both human
and artificial) agents. 50
 Reasons to evolve thesauri to ontologies

 Little possibility of re-use due to inherent semantic ambiguity and lack of

the explicitness of their semantics .

 Difficulties in the diversity of their representational form (no common

representational language)

 Developed for human use. They lack of expressive mechanisms to

represent, maintain, and reason about complex knowledge in an explicit
form- interpretation is left for humans.

(Source:http://www.xmluk.org/slides/magic-
circle_2002/wilson/XML_UK_SW_Thes/all.htm) 51
ONTOLOGY VS TAXONOMY
 Taxonomy
 Is a classification of terms in form of a hierarchy using typically a father-son
relationship (i.e. Type of)
 Example The taxonomy of the leaving beings

Kingdom: Animalia
Filo: Chordata
Subfilo: Vertebrata
……

52
 ONTOLOGY AS TAXONOMY
Taxonomy is a classification system where each node has only one parent
– simple ontology
Living Beings

Animals Plants

Vertebrates Invertebrates
53
 STRUCTURE OF AN ONTOLOGY

Ontologies typically have two distinct components:

 Names for important concepts and relationships in the domain
 Elephant is a concept whose members are a kind of animal
 Herbivore is a concept whose members are exactly those
animals who eat only plants or parts of plants
 Background knowledge/constraints on the domain
 Adult_Elephants weigh at least 2,000 kg
 No individual can be both a Herbivore and a Carnivore

54
A SIMPLE ONTOLOGY: ANIMALS

55
ONTOLOGY OF PEOPLE AND THEIR
ROLES

Employee Contractor

Manager Expert Analyst

advises

Programme Mgr Project Mgr

funds

56
 ONTOLOGY EXAMPLES

 Taxonomies on the Web

– Yahoo! Categories
 Catalogs for on-line shopping

– Amazon.com product catalog

 Dublin Core and other standards for the Web

 Domain independent examples

– Ontoclean
– Sumo

57
CLASSIFYING ONTOLOGIES

58
 [Deborah McGuinness, Stanford]
CLASSIFYING ONTOLOGY BASED ON
SEMANTIC SPECTRUM

General
Formal Frames
Thesauri Logical
Is-a (properties)
constraints
Catalog/
ID

Disjointness,
Informal Formal Inverse, partof
Terms/
Is-a instance
glossary Value
restrictions

59
 CLASSIFYING ONTOLOGY BASED ON DEGREE OF
CONCEPTUALIZATION

Top-level ontologies
 describes very general notions which are independent of a particular problem or domain

 are applicable across domains and includes vocabulary related to things, events, time, space,
etc

Domain ontologies
 knowledge represented in this kind of ontologies is specific to a particular domain such as
forestry, fishery, etc.
 They provide vocabularies about concepts in a domain and their relationships or about the
theories governing the domain.

Application or task ontologies

 describe knowledge pieces depending both on a particular domain and task.

 Therefore, they are related to problem solving methods.

60
 CLASSIFYING ONTOLOGY BASED ON GENERALITY
[Guarino, 98]

Describe very general concepts like space, time, event, which are independent of a
particular problem or domain. It seems reasonable to have unified top-level
ontologies for large communities of users.

Describe the
vocabulary related Describe the
to a generic vocabulary
domain by related to a
specializing the generic task or
concepts introduced activity by
in the top-level specializing the
ontology. top-level
ontologies.

These are the most specific ontologies. Concepts in application

ontologies often correspond to roles played by domain entities while 61
performing a certain activity.
 CLASSIFYING ONTOLOGY BASED ON
INFORMATION REPRESENTED [Gomez Perez, 2004
 Knowlegde representation ontology : provide primitive modeling
elements of knowledge representation models.
 Generic and common use ontology: represent common sense
knowledge that can be used in different domains
 Upper ontology : describe general concepts.

 Domain ontology : offer concepts that can be reused within a

specific domain
 Task ontology : describe vocabulary related to a task or activity.

 Domain-task ontology :task ontology that can be reused in one

specific domain.
 Method ontology: provide definitions for concepts and relationships
relevant to a process.
 Application ontology :contain all the necessary concepts to model 62
the application in question
 COMPLEXITY OF ONTOLOGIES
Depending on the wide range of tasks to which the ontologies are put
ontologies can vary in their complexity

Ontologies range from simple taxonomies to highly tangled networks

including constraints associated with concepts and relations.
Light-weight Ontology
 concepts
 ‘is-a’ hierarchy among concepts
 relations between concepts

Heavy-weight Ontology
 cardinality constraints
 Taxonomy of relations
 Axioms (restrictions)
 Metaclasses
 Type constraints on relations
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 Expressiveness
 Inference systems
WEB ONTOLOGIES
 Web Ontology Description Languages

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ARCHITECTURE OF SEMANTIC WEB[Berners Lee

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XML (EXTENSIBLE MARKUP
LANGUAGE)
 Standard markup language to represent the user-defined
markup language
 Simple, but flexible text-format defined from SGML

 Advantages
 Data representation
 Structured & independent
 Data sharing and interoperability
 Hierarchical

 Disadvantages
 Lack of representation of relationship between objects
 Lack of representation of data meaning
 Lack of inheritance of meaning
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RDF (RESOURCE DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK)
 Markup language based on XML syntax
 Developed to representation the multiple, various resources
dispersed in the distributed web environment
 Used as a basis for the other markup language

 Data representation : triple representation as follows <object,

property, value>
 Advantages
 Representation of data with the meaning
 Environment in which computer can understand and process the data
 Flexible capability to representation the meta data
 Mean of information exchange in heterogeneous distributed environment

 Disadvantages
 Weak in the representation of semantic of data

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RDF SCHEMA
 RDF is a data model for objects and relations between
them
 RDF Schema (RDFS) is a vocabulary description
language based on XML and logic programming.
 Describes properties and classes of RDF resources
 Provides semantics for generalization hierarchies of
properties and classes

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OIL (ONTOLOGY INFERENCE LAYER)
 Based on Frame-based System, Description Logic and
Web Languages
 Advantages
 Hierarchical extensions
 Effective inference mechanism based on the Description
Logic
 Well-defined semantics

 Disadvantages
 Impossible to define the default-value
 Impossible to provide the meta-class

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DAML (DARPA AGENT MARKUP
LANGUAGE)
 Based on XML and RDF

 Combines the advantage of various, multiple semantic web languages

 Combination of DAML + OIL
 DAML-S
 Automatic Web Service retrieval and execution
 DAML-L
 Logic representation
 Advantages
 Powerful in the representation of meaning and constraints
 Support for the XML-Schema data type
 Support well-defined semantics
 Support default value

 Disadvantages
 Can’t exclude the RDF and XML
 Can’t be formal language
 Less extensible compared with OIL

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 DAML+OIL

 DAML was funded by US government. US Defense

Advanced Research Project Agency launched the
DARPA Agent Markup Language to make web content
more accessible.
 Ontology Inference Layer (OIL), a description logic.
 DAML+OIL
 developed by a joint committee from the US and the European
Union (IST) in the context of DAML, a DARPA project for
allowing semantic interoperability in XML.
 DAML+OIL is built on RDF(S), extends with arbitrary data
types from XML Schema type system.

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 OWL (WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE)

 A richer ontology language based on description logic.

More expressive language and Less complex than RDF
Schema.
 Is the current Web standard
 Three species of OWL
 OWL fullis union of OWL syntax and RDF
 OWL DL restricted to FOL fragment (¼ DAML+OIL)
 OWL Lite is “easier to implement” subset of OWL DL
 OWL DL Benefits from many years of DL research
 Well defined semantics
 Formal properties well understood (complexity, decidability)
 Known reasoning algorithms
 Implemented systems (highly optimised)

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 OWL (WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE)
 Relationships between classes
 equivalentClass
 subClassOf
 Intersection, union, complement, disjunction

 Relationships between instances

 sameAs, differentFrom

 Properties of properties
 Domain, Range
 Cardinality
 Transitive, Symmetric
 allValuesFrom, someValuesFrom
 Functional, InverseFunctional

 Relationships between properties

 subPropertyOf
 inverseOf
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 MORE ONTOLOGY LANGUAGES

 SHOE – Simple HTML Ontology Extension

(University of Maryland)
 OML – Ontology Markup Language (University
of Washington) is partially based on SHOE,
provides serialization of SHOE
 XOL – Ontology Exchange Language (US
bioinformatics community) for exchange of
ontology definitions among different software
systems.

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 EXPRESSIVENESS OF LANGUAGES

 XOL
 RDFS

 SHOE

 OML

 OIL

 DAML+OIL

Heavyweight

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