Chapter 6 - The Semantic Web and Web 2.0

Abstract

This article focuses on Semantic Web, which is another important Web development, besides Web 2.0, that has emerged roughly since 2001. Tim Berners-Lee and others wrote in their famous paper “The Semantic Web—A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities” in the Scientific American that 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. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. A comparison of the features available through Web 2.0 technology, in particular, social bookmarking, tagging, and folksonomies, with Semantic Web developments such as taxonomies and ontologies, is presented. The possible augmentations and enhancements to traditional search engines and data integration are the core idea of the Semantic. A considerable number of techniques and approaches to deal with data integration problems, that fall in two basic categories: virtual integration and materialized integration. Materialized systems include search engines with their index, but also data warehouses as used in online analytical processing (OLAP) applications. Virtual systems include meta search engines such as Mamma, multidatabase systems as well as systems building on so called mediated integration. Languages at the core of Semantic Web development include RDF (the Resource Description Framework), RDF Schema (RDFS, a schema specification language), and OWL (Web Ontology Language).