Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part 1 Modeling Web Data
- Part 2 Web Data Semantics and Integration
- 7 Ontologies, RDF, and OWL
- 8 Querying Data Through Ontologies
- 9 Data Integration
- 10 Putting into Practice: Wrappers and Data Extraction with XSLT
- 11 Putting into Practice: Ontologies in Practice
- 12 Putting into Practice: Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes and XProc
- Part 3 Building Web Scale Applications
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Ontologies, RDF, and OWL
from Part 2 - Web Data Semantics and Integration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part 1 Modeling Web Data
- Part 2 Web Data Semantics and Integration
- 7 Ontologies, RDF, and OWL
- 8 Querying Data Through Ontologies
- 9 Data Integration
- 10 Putting into Practice: Wrappers and Data Extraction with XSLT
- 11 Putting into Practice: Ontologies in Practice
- 12 Putting into Practice: Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes and XProc
- Part 3 Building Web Scale Applications
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The vision of the Semantic Web is that of a world-wide distributed architecture where data and services easily interoperate. This vision is not yet a reality in the Web of today, in which given a particular need, it is difficult to find a resource that is appropriate to it. Also, given a relevant resource, it is not easy to understand what it provides and how to use it. To solve such limitations, facilitate interoperability, and thereby enable the Semantic Web vision, the key idea is to also publish semantics descriptions of Web resources. These descriptions rely on semantic annotations, typically on logical assertions that relate resources to some terms in predefined ontologies. This is the topic of the chapter.
An ontology is a formal description providing human users a shared understanding of a given domain. The ontologies we consider here can also be interpreted and processed by machines thanks to a logical semantics that enables reasoning. Ontologies provide the basis for sharing knowledge, and, as such, they are very useful for a number of reasons:
Organizing data. It is very easy to get lost in large collections of documents. An ontology is a natural means of “organizing” (structuring) it and thereby facilitates browsing through it to find interesting information. It provides an organization that is flexible, and that naturally structures the information in multidimensional ways. For instance, an ontology may allow browsing through the courses offered by a university by topic or department, by quarter or time, by level, and so forth.
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- Information
- Web Data Management , pp. 143 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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