21 february 2012kaiser: coms e61251 coms e6125 web-enhanced information management (whim) prof. gail...
TRANSCRIPT
21 February 2012 Kaiser: COMS E6125 1
COMS E6125 Web-COMS E6125 Web-enHanced Information enHanced Information Management (WHIM)Management (WHIM)
COMS E6125 Web-COMS E6125 Web-enHanced Information enHanced Information Management (WHIM)Management (WHIM)
Prof. Gail KaiserProf. Gail Kaiser
Spring 2012Spring 2012
21 February 2012 Kaiser: COMS E6125 2
Today’s Topic:
• Introduction to theSemantic Web
• RDF• Ontologies
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Simplicity is Good• The World Wide Web contains huge amounts
of information created by many different organizations, communities and individuals for many different reasons
• Web users can easily access this information by specifying a known URL or using a search engine, and following links to find other related resources
• This simplicity is a key aspect that made the Web so popular
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Simplicity is Bad• The simplicity of the current Web has a price• It is very easy to get lost, or discover irrelevant
or unrelated information• For instance, if we search for courses taught by
a person named “Gail Kaiser”, we might find all kinds of other information
• https://www.google.com/search?q=courses+taught+by+gail+kaiser&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
• The problem is that the search engine does know what “courses” or “taught” means
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Machine accessible meaning
(What it’s like to be a machine)
CV
name
education
work
private
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So what does this mean?
• What’s a “CV”?• What’s a “name”?• Etc.Need semantics
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What to do?• Develop enabling standards and
technologies – to help machines understand more
information on the Web – so that they can support richer
discovery, data integration, navigation and automation of tasks
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Add Metadata• Associate semantically rich, descriptive
information with any resource• For instance, add metadata about
teaching, so we can search for documents that have metadata specifying “Gail Kaiser” as a “teacher” (or “instructor”)
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The Semantic Web• Provides a common framework that allows
data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries
• Not only provides URLs for documents, but to people, concepts and relationships
• By giving unique identifiers to the person, the role “teacher” and the concept of “course”, we make very clear who the person is and the corresponding relation between this person and a particular document
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What’s the difference?• Most Web content today is designed for humans
to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully
• Computers can adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing—here a header, there a link to another page—but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantics
• The Semantic Web brings structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can carry out sophisticated tasks for users
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What’s the difference?
The Semantic Web is not a separate web but an extension of the current web, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation.
[Berners-Lee et al., 2001]
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Wasn’t that what XML was supposed to do?
• Yes and no• For the Semantic Web to function,
computers must have access to structured collections of information and to sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning
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Isn’t that just Knowledge
Representation?• Traditional knowledge representation
systems typically have been centralized, requiring everyone to share exactly the same definition of common concepts such as “parent” or “vehicle”
• But central control is stifling, and doesn’t scale
• Which is why centralized hypertext link servers were abandoned for WWW
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What about Web Services?
• Web services are computational programs accessed using Web technologies
• They may or may not operate on Web pages as data
• But when they do, the semantics are implied by WSDL descriptions but basically hidden inside the code
• There is no way for an arbitrary Web service or other program to “understand” the semantics of Web pages
Semantic Web Layers(T. Berners-Lee)
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Start with XML, not HTML
<H1>WHIM</H1><UL>
<LI>Instructor: Gail Kaiser<LI>Students: Donald Duck
</UL>
<H1>WHIM</H1><UL>
<LI>Instructor: Gail Kaiser<LI>Students: Donald Duck
</UL>
HTML:
<course date=“Spring 2012”><title>WHIM</title><instructor>Gail Kaiser</instructor><students>Donald Duck</students>
</course>
<course date=“Spring 2012”><title>WHIM</title><instructor>Gail Kaiser</instructor><students>Donald Duck</students>
</course>
XML:
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XML document = labeled tree
course
instructortitle students
name http
<course date=“...”> <title>...</title> <instructor>...</instructor>
<name>...</name><http>...</http>
<students>...</students></course>
=
• XML Schema: grammars for describing legal trees and datatypes
• node = label + attr/values + contents
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Why not use XML Tags to represent Semantics?
• Syntax: the structure of your data • Semantics: the meaning of your data• Two conditions necessary for
interoperability:– Adopt a common syntax: enables applications
to parse the data – Adopt a means for understanding the
semantics: enables applications to use the data
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XML and Semantics?<title> … <title>• But what does “title” mean?• If we ask google, we get (on the 1st page)
– Sports equipment and competitions– Prefix or suffix added to person’s name– Laws regarding rights to a piece of property– HTML tag– Women’s underwear– Library search for books– A research paper on “ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC
COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH NON-INDIGENOUS SPECIES IN THE UNITED STATES”
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XML Limitations for Semantic Markup
• XML makes no commitment on: Domain-specific vocabulary Modeling primitives
• Requires pre-arranged agreement on &
• Only feasible for closed collaboration– agents in a small & stable community– pages on a small & stable intranet
• Not suited for sharing Web resources
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XML machine accessible meaning
CV
name
education
work
private
< >
< >
< >
< >
< >
< >
< >
<>
<>
<>
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Beyond XML• XML lets everyone create their own
tags • Scripts, or programs, can make use of
these tags in sophisticated ways - but the programmer has to know what the page writer uses each tag for
• XML allows users to add structure to their documents but says nothing about what the structures mean
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Semantic Web Layers
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Add RDF = Resource Description Framework• Encodes meaning in sets of triples - subject,
predicate and object - analogous to the subject, verb and object of an elementary sentence
• Makes assertions that particular things (people, Web pages or whatever) have properties (such as “is a sister of”, “is the author of”) with certain values (another person, another Web page)
• This structure can describe much of the data processed by machines
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Example• Imagine that we want to state the fact
that someone named Gail Kaiser wrote a particular Web page
• A straightforward way to state this in English would be in the form of a simple statement such as:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/index.html has an author whose value is Gail Kaiser
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Making Statements about Resources
• We need a way to identify the thing we want to describe (the Web page)
• We need a way to identify a specific property (author) of the thing that we want to describe
• We need a way to identify the thing we want to assign as the value of this property (who the author is), for the thing we want to describe
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Making Statements about Resources
• In the example, we used the Web page's URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to identify it - subject
• We used the word “author” to identify the property we want to talk about - predicate
• And the phrase “Gail Kaiser” to identify the thing (a person) we want to say is the value of this property - object
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Many Statements can be made
• We could state other properties of this Web page by writing additional English statements of the same general form
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/index.html has a modification-date whose value is February 01, 2012
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/index.html has a size whose value is 20,860 bytes
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But what do these Statements actually
mean?• Subject and object can each be identified by a
URL, just as used in a link on a Web page• The verbs – predicates – can also be identified
by URLs, which enables anyone to define a new concept, a new predicate, just by defining a URL for it somewhere on the Web (a “Web resource”)
• The URLs ensure that concepts are not just words in a document, but are tied to a unique definition that everyone can find on the Web
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Web Resources• RDF is a language for representing
information about resources on the World Wide Web
• It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, modification date and size of a Web page
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Generalized Resources• By generalizing the concept of a “Web
resource”, RDF can be used to represent information about things that can be identified on the Web, even when they can't be directly retrieved on the Web
• Examples include the author of the web page
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Reconsider Examplehttp://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kaiser/
index.html has an author whose value is Gail Kaiser
Neither the notion of a “author” nor Gail Kaiser can be retrieved from the Web
Thus we need URIs in addition to URLs
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Concept Graphs• RDF is based on the idea of identifying
things using URIs• And describing resources (subjects) in
terms of simple properties (verbs or predicates) and property values (objects)
• This enables RDF to represent related concepts as a graph of nodes and arcs representing the resources, their properties and values
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Concept Graph Example• XML syntax• Chained triples form a graph
http://www.psl.cs.columbia.edu/courses/whim/
site-owner
Kaiserkaiser+6125@...
emailW3C
describes
http://www.w3.org/RDF
site-owner
<rdf:Description rdf:about=“#Kaiser”> <email>kaiser+6125@...</email></rdf:Description>
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Information Exchange• RDF provides a common framework for expressing
this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning
• The ability to exchange information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created
• Application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools
• RDF is written in XML format further leveraging XML tools and experience
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What is RDF (again) ?• RDF is a data model
– the model is domain-neutral and application-neutral
– the model can be viewed as directed, labeled graphs or as an object-oriented model (object/attribute/value)
• RDF data model is an abstract, conceptual layer independent of XML
• consequently, XML is a transfer syntax for RDF, not a component of RDF
• RDF data might never occur in XML form
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RDF Model
• RDF “statements” consist ofresources (= nodes)
which have propertieswhich have values (= nodes,strings)
= subject= predicate= object
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RDF Model
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
“Dave Beckett”
editor
“http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/ has the editor Dave Beckett”
resource valueproperty
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RDF Model Example
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
“Dave Beckett”
dc:Creator
“2004-02-10”
dc:Date
“W3C”
dc:Publisher
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Complex Values• So far, values of properties have been
strings• A graph node (corresponding to a resource)
also can be the value of a property–arbitrarily complex tree and graph structures are possible
–syntactically, values can be embedded (i.e., lexically in-line) or referenced (linked)
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Complex Values
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
“Dave Beckett”
dc:Creator
“mailto:[email protected]”
p:EMail
p:Name
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Complex Values• Corresponding triples
{ “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/”, dc:Creator, x }
{ x, p:Name, “Dave Beckett” }{ x, p:EMail, “[email protected]” }
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
“Dave Beckett”
dc:Creator
“mailto:[email protected]”
p:EMail
p:Name
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Containers• Containers are collections - allow grouping of
resources (or literal values)• It is possible to make statements about the
container (as a whole) or about its members individually Different types of containers– bag - unordered collection– seq - ordered collection (= “sequence”)– alt - represents alternatives
• It is possible to create collections based on URI patterns – e.g., all files in a particular web site
• Duplicate values are permitted - no mechanism to enforce unique value constraints
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Containers
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax
“Dave Beckett”
rdf:_1
rdf:Seq
dc:Creator
rdf:Type
“Brian McBride”
rdf:_2
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Higher-order Statements• One can make RDF statements about other RDF
statements• Example: “The Library of Congress affiliates Dave
Beckett as the author of the RDF Syntax spec”• Allow us to express beliefs (and other modalities)• Important for trust models, digital signatures, etc.• Constitute metadata about metadata• Represented by modeling RDF in RDF itself
Reification
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax “Dave Beckett”dc:Creator
“Library of Congress”
dc:Creator
• The dotted box corresponds to the following statements
• { x, rdf:predicate, “dc:creator” }• { x, rdf:subject, “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax }• { x, rdf:object, “Dave Beckett” }• { x, rdf:type, “rdf:statement” }
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Reification
• Reification allows a computer to process an abstraction as if it were any other datum
• RDF is not really second-order• But it does provide a built-in predicate
vocabulary for reification
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Reification
pers05 ISBN...Author-of
NYT claims
<rdf:Description rdf:about=“#NYT”> <claims> <rdf:Description rdf:about=“#pers05”> <authorOf>ISBN...</authorOf> </rdf:Description> </claims></rdf:Description>
Any statement can be an object (graphs can be nested)
49
RDF Schema • Defines small vocabulary for RDF:
• Class, subClassOf, type• Property, subPropertyOf• domain, range
• Organizes this vocabulary in a typed hierarchy
• Vocabulary can be used to define other vocabularies for your application domain
Person
Student Researcher
subClassOfsubClassOf
type
hasSuperVisordomain range
Swap
type
hasSuperVisor Gail
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<rdf:Description ID="MotorVehicle"> <rdf:type resource="http://www.w3.org/...#Class"/> <rdf:subClassOf rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/...#Resource"/></rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description ID="Truck"> <rdf:type resource="http://www.w3.org/...#Class"/> <rdf:subClassOf rdf:resource="#MotorVehicle"/></rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description ID="registeredTo"> <rdf:type resource="http://www.w3.org/...#Property"/> <rdf:domain rdf:resource="#MotorVehicle"/> <rdf:range rdf:resource="#Person"/></rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description ID=”ownedBy"> <rdf:type resource="http://www.w3.org/...#Property"/> <rdf:subPropertyOf rdf:resource="#registeredTo"/></rdf:Description>
RDF Schema syntax in XML
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Conclusions about RDF• Next step up from plain XML
– modeling primitives– possible to define vocabulary
• However:– no precisely described meaning– no inference model
• Problematic examples: • “Columbus believed that the world is flat”• “Gloria believes that the Web should be delivered
on CD-ROM”
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Where do we get the precisely defined
meaning?• Two databases may use different identifiers for
the same concept, such as zip code vs. postal code
• A program that wants to compare or combine information across the two databases has to know that these two terms mean the same thing
• The program must have a way to discover such common meanings for whatever databases it encounters
• A solution to this problem is provided by collections of information called ontologies
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Semantic Web Layers
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What is an Ontology?
• In philosophy, an ontology is a theory about the nature of existence, of what types of things exist; ontology as a discipline studies such theories
• Semantic Web researchers (and various other communities) have co-opted the term for their own jargon
• For Semantic Web researchers, an ontology is a document or file that formally defines the relationships among terms
• The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules
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What is a Taxonomy?
Taxonomy = segmentation, classification and ordering of elements into a classification system according to the relationships between each other
Object
Person Topic Document
ResearcherStudent Semantics
OntologyDoctoral Student PhD Student F-Logic
Menu
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Taxonomies• A taxonomy defines classes of objects and
relations among them• For example, an address may be defined as a
type of location, and city codes may be defined to apply only to locations
• If city codes must be of type city and cities generally have Web sites, we can discuss the Web site associated with a city code even if no database links a city code directly to a Web site
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An Ontology also provides a form of Thesaurus
Object
Person Topic Document
Researcher
Student
Semantics
PhD StudentDoctoral Student
• Terminology for specific domain• Graph with primitives, fixed relationships (similar, synonym)
similarsynonym
OntologyF-Logic
Menu
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An Ontology also provides a Topic Map
• Topics (nodes), relationships and occurrences (to documents)• Useful for navigation and visualization
Object
Person Topic Document
ResearcherStudent Semantics
PhD StudentDoctoral Student
knows described_in
writes
AffiliationTel
OntologyF-Logic
similarsynonym
Menu
OntologyF-Logic
similar
PhD StudentDoctoral Student
The Taxonomy is Augmented by Inference Rules
Object
Person Topic Document
Tel
Semantics
knows described_in
writes
Affiliation
described_in is_about
knowsP writes D is_about T P T
DT T D
Rules
ResearcherStudent
instance_of
is_a
is_a
is_a
Swapneel Sheth
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Inference Rules• An ontology may express the rule “If a city code is
associated with a state code, and an address uses that city code, then that address has the associated state code”
• A program could then deduce, for instance, that a Columbia University address, being in New York City, must be in New York State, which is in the U.S., and therefore should be formatted to U.S. standards
• The computer doesn't truly “understand” any of this information
• But it can now manipulate the terms much more effectively in ways that are useful and meaningful to the human user
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Solution to Terminology Problems
• The meaning of terms or XML tags used on a Web page can be defined by pointers from the page to an ontology
• The same problems as before now arise if I point to an ontology that defines addresses as containing a zip code and you point to one that uses postal code
• This can be resolved if ontologies (or other Web services) provide equivalence relations: one or both of our ontologies may contain the information that my zip code is equivalent to your postal code
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Using Ontologies• Ontologies can be used in a simple fashion to
improve the accuracy of Web searches• The search program can look for only those
pages that refer to a precise concept instead of all the ones using ambiguous keywords
• More advanced applications could use ontologies to relate the information on a page to the associated knowledge structures and inference rules
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Example• Suppose you wish to find the Ms. Cook
you met at a trade conference last year• You don't remember her first name, but
you remember that she worked for one of your clients and that her brother was a student at your alma mater
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Example• An intelligent search program can sift
through all the pages of people whose name is “Cook”
• Sidestep all the pages relating to cooks, cooking, the Cook Islands and so forth
• Find the person named Cook who works for a company that's on your client list
• And follow links to Web pages of their relatives to track down if any are in school at the right place
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Agents• The real power of the Semantic Web will be
realized when people create (many) programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs
• The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available
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Proofs• The Semantic Web promotes this
synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data comes with semantics
• An important facet of agents' functioning will be the exchange of “proofs”
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Example• Suppose Ms. Cook's contact information
has been located by an online service, and places her in Baghdad
• You want to check this, so your computer asks the service for a proof of its answer
• An inference engine on your computer verifies this proof, i.e., that this Ms. Cook indeed matches the one you were seeking, and it can show you the relevant Web pages if you still have doubts
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Service Discovery
• Many automated Web-based services already exist without semantics
• But current service discovery initiatives attack the problem at a structural or syntactic level, and rely heavily on standardization of a predetermined set of functionality descriptions
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Service Discovery• Other programs such as agents have no way to
locate a service that will perform a specific function• This process can happen only when there is a
common language to describe a service in a way that lets other agents “understand” both the function offered and how to take advantage of it
• The consumer and producer agents can reach a shared understanding by exchanging ontologies, which provide the vocabulary needed for discussion
• Semantics also makes it easier to take advantage of a service that only partially matches a request
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Non-Web Applications• The Semantic Web can extend into our
physical world• URIs can point to anything, including physical
entities, which means we can use RDF to describe devices such as cell phones and TVs
• Such devices can advertise their functionality —what they can do and how they are controlled —much like software agents
• Semantic descriptions of device capabilities and functionality will let us achieve “home automation” with minimal human intervention
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Examples• When you answer your phone, other sound is
automatically turned down– Instead of having to program each specific
appliance, you could program such a function once and for all to cover every local device that advertises having a volume control — the TV, the DVD player, the media players on the laptop, …
• Your Web-enabled microwave oven consults the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters
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OWL Delivers Ontologies that Work
on the Web• What's needed next is a way to develop
domain specific vocabularies• An ontology defines the terms used to
describe and represent an area of knowledge
• Ontologies include computer-usable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and the relationships among them, making that knowledge reusable
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OWL = Web Ontology Language
• For defining structured, Web-based ontologies enabling richer integration and interoperability of data among descriptive communities
• Uses URIs for naming • Uses RDF and RDF Schema for description• Adds vocabulary for describing relations
between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry)
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Semantic Web Layers
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Semantic Web Layers• The Unicode and URI layers make sure
that we use international character sets and provide means for identifying the objects in the Semantic Web
• The XML layer with namespaces and schema definitions make sure we can integrate the Semantic Web definitions with other XML-based standards
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Semantic Web Layers• RDF and RDFSchema make it possible to
make statements about objects with URIs and define vocabularies that can be referred to by URIs
• RDFSchema defines the XML vocabulary for defining classes, subclasses, properties and subproperties
• The Ontology layer (OWL) supports the evolution of vocabularies as it can define relations between the different concepts
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Semantic Web Layers• The top layers, Logic, Proof and Trust,
are “under development”• The Logic layer will enable the writing
of rules• The Proof layer will execute the rules • The Trust layer together with the Digital
Signature layer will provide mechanisms for applications to determine whether to trust the given proof or not
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Semantic Web Layers
RFC
Standard
Standard
Standard
Work in Progress
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Next Assignment: Midterm Paper
• Each paper must have a title, an author (with contact information), a brief abstract (about 100 words), an introductory section, some number of body sections (3-5 is typical), a concluding section, and a bibliographic list of references – most of which are cited somewhere in the paper
• Do not simply survey some topic: Instead compare this to that, argue a position in favor or against something, evaluate something according to some meaningful criteria, etc.
• Pretend your reader will be another member of the class, who has heard all the same lectures you have/will, but may not know anything at all about the specifics of your particular topic
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Midterm Paper: Academic Honesty
• All copied material must be short and must be explicitly “quoted” and [cited]
• Non-copied material based conceptually on references must also be [cited] – do not paraphrase, write in your own words
• Example:– “If you don’t like the Android phones on the market, just wait a
minute.” [1]– [1] David Pogue, Android Phones Take a Power Trip,The
New York Times, online edition, February 8, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/technology/personaltech/android-phones-go-on-a-power-trip-state-of-the-art.html
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Midterm Paper: Logistics
• Due Tuesday February 28th by 10am• Approximately 15 pages (not including
figures and reference list)• Submit by posting in Full Papers folder
on CourseWorks• Must be in a format I can read, and the
filename must adhere to the required naming convention (e.g., Full_Paper_Jane_Doe.pdf).
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Upcoming Assignments• Full paper due Tuesday February 28th
• Project proposal due Tuesday March 6th
• Presentation proposal also due Tuesday March 6th
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COMS E6125 Web-COMS E6125 Web-enHanced Information enHanced Information Management (WHIM)Management (WHIM)
COMS E6125 Web-COMS E6125 Web-enHanced Information enHanced Information Management (WHIM)Management (WHIM)
Prof. Gail KaiserProf. Gail Kaiser
Spring 2012Spring 2012