For many of us the World Wide Web is not an alien concept today. The WWW we have today is a result of the efforts of the thousands of different people working continuously in providing content. Among the billions of web sites we have online today we crawl through billions of different elements of information. But have you ever thought whether you know the actual pieces of information out there in what you browse before you actually read through?
I know the last sentence would have made you a bit more confusing. Indeed we are caught up today in a keyword based paradigm where we do not heed the actual meanings of different content that we browse. The search engines and all the other different systems working on internet mostly look for keywords and act rather than trying to understand what they really mean. I will tell you an incident that happened to me few days ago. One of my friends wanted to know some details on Alaska as he wanted to travel there and he asked me if I know something about that place. Until then I had never encountered a situation where I wanted to search where Alaska is or any other details. So I started searching for some information on Alaska. My first search parameter on google was "Pictures of Alaska" and then I was not happy with the set of photos I received and then accidentally I tried the "Photos of Alaska" as my next search parameter. I had believed the words "Photo" and "Pictures' would have implied the same meaning but these two searches yielded a complete two different results sets.
Indeed the internet we have today knows nothing about what information it contains. It just manipulates the information which flows from different sources varying from different databases, file systems services and so on. But the actual information or simple its semantics is not known to any of these machines involved in bringing internet to us.
As the word implies the Semantic Web is the paradigm where we know the actual pieces of information that are contained in these information sources. For an example just suppose that we are browsing a certain web page on our favourite web browser. The bowser has no idea as to what information it has. In the semantic web every bit of information is connected with each other. You have the relationships of each information that you have in a single document. These relationships help us to work with the information quite intelligently and perform very effective searches and other functions on them. For an example we have known that the Cancer is a diseases that is associated with a huge number of different topics ranging from diseases due to abnormal cell growth to radioactivity. It is hard to find a solution for cancer for a single team because the knowledge of all these areas is so huge that you can not pile them up together and learn them all during your life time. But if we could analyze all this knowledge and then find out the relationships among bits and pieces then we could have used machines to go for ultimate solution for cancer. Since in Semantic Web all information from different articles on cancer will be mapped with their relationships, the moment you search under the word cancer you will get each bits and pieces of information mapped with respect their relationship and even the machines can then understand what cancer is all about.
The two following diagrams will ease you understand how these related information will look like.
Semantic Web can be formed if we can extract the semantic metadata present in each of these documents and then find out the relationships among them. The above diagrams are built in that way.
People are confused as to whether the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 both are the same. Indeed the Web of Data or the Semantic Web is just a part of Web 3.0. The web 3.0 is a far from reality more sophisticated but cooler concept. We will take the Web 3.0 into discussion during the later posts.
