Chapter 8

Conclusion and Outlook

Grigoris Antoniou
Frank van Harmelen

1 Chapter 8 A Semantic Web Primer

 Lecture Outline

1. Which Semantic Web?

2. Four Popular Fallacies
3. Current Status
4. Selected Key Research Challenges

2 Chapter 8 A Semantic Web Primer

 Interpretation 1: The Semantic Web as
the Web of Data

⚫ The main aim of the Semantic Web is to enable

the integration of structured and semistructured
data sources over the Web
⚫ The main recipe is to expose datasets on the
Web in RDF format and to use RDF Schema to
express the intended semantics of these
datasets
⚫ A typical use is the combination of geodata with
a set of consumer ratings for restaurants in order
to provide an enriched information source

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 Interpretation 2: The Semantic Web as
Enrichment of the Current Web

⚫ The aim of the Semantic Web is to improve

the current World Wide Web
⚫ Typical uses are :
– Improved search engines
– Dynamic personalization of Web sites
– Semantic enrichment of existing Web pages

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 Interpretation 2: The Semantic Web as
Enrichment of the Current Web (2)

⚫ The sources of the required semantic metadata

are mostly claimed to be automated sources
– Concept extraction
– Named-entity recognition
– Automatic classification
⚫ More recently the insight is gaining ground that
the required semantic markup can also be
produced by social mechanisms in communities
that provide large-scale human-produced
markup

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 Lecture Outline

1. Which Semantic Web?

2. Four Popular Fallacies
3. Current Status
4. Selected Key Research Challenges

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 1. The semantic Web tries to enforce
meaning from the top

⚫ This fallacy claims that the Semantic Web

enforces meaning on users through its
standards OWL and RDFS
⚫ The only meaning that OWL and RDFS enforce
is the meaning of the connectives in a language
in which users can express their own meanings
⚫ Users are free to choose their own vocabularies
and to describe whatever domains the choose

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 1. The semantic Web tries to enforce
meaning from the top (2)

⚫ The situation is comparable to HTML:

– HTML does not enforce the lay-out of web-pages
“from the top”
– All HTML enforces is the language that people
can use to describe their own lay-out
– HTML has shown that such an agreement on the
use of a standardized language is a necessary
ingredient for world-wide interoperability

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 2. Everybody must subscribe to a single
predefined meaning for the terms they use

⚫ The meaning of terms cannot be predefined for

global use in addition meaning is fluid and contextual
⚫ The motto of the Semantic Web is not the
enforcement of a single ontology but rather “let a
thousand ontologies blossom”
⚫ That is the reason that the construction of mappings
between ontologies is such a core topic in the
Semantic Web community
⚫ Such mappings are expected to be partial, imperfect
and context-dependent

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 3. Users must understand the complicated details of
formalized knowledge representation

⚫ Some of the core technology of the Semantic

Web relies on intricate details of formalized
knowledge representation
⚫ The semantics of RDF Schema and OWL
and the layering of the subspecies of OWL
are difficult formal matters
⚫ The design of good ontologies is a
specialized area of Knowledge Engineering
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 3. Users must understand the complicated details of
formalized knowledge representation (2)

⚫ For most users of Semantic Web

applications, such details will remain entirely
behind the scene
⚫ Navigation or personalization engines can be
powered by underlying ontologies, expressed
in RDF Schema or OWL, without users ever
being confronted with the ontologies, let
alone their representation languages

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 4. The semantic Web requires the manual
markup of all existing Web pages

⚫ It is hard enough for most Web site owners to

maintain the human-readable content of their sites
⚫ They will certainly not maintain parallel machine-
accessible versions of the same information in RDF
or OWL
⚫ If that were necessary, it would indeed spell bad
news for the Semantic Web
⚫ Instead, Semantic Web application rely on large-
scale automation for the extraction of such semantic
markup from the sources themselves

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 Lecture Outline

1. Which Semantic Web?

2. Four Popular Fallacies
3. Current Status
4. Selected Key Research Challenges

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 Four Main Questions

⚫ Where do the metadata come from?

⚫ Where do the ontologies come from?
⚫ What should be done with the many
ontologies?
⚫ Where’s the "Web " in Semantic Web?

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 Question 1: Where do the metadata
come from?

⚫ Much of the semantic metadata come from

Natural Language Processing and Machine
Learning technology
⚫ It is now possible with off-the-shelf
technology to produce semantic markup for
very large corpuses of Web pages by
annotating them with terms from very large
ontologies with sufficient precision and recall
to drive semantic navigation interfaces

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 Question 1: Where do the metadata
come from? (2)

⚫ More recent is the capability of social

communities to provide large amounts of
human-generated markup
⚫ Millions of images with hundreds of million of
manually provided metadata tags are found
on some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites

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 Question 2: Where do the ontologies
come from?

⚫ The term ontology as used by the Semantic Web

community now covers a wide array of semantic
structures, from lightweight hierarchies such as
MeSH to heavily axiomatized ontologies such as
GALEN
⚫ The world is full of such “ontologies”:
– Companies have product catalogs
– Organizations have internal glossaries
– Scientific communities have their public metadata
schemata

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 Question 2: Where do the ontologies
come from? (2)

⚫ These have been constructed for other

purposes, most often predating Semantic Web
⚫ There are also significant advances in the area
of ontology learning, although results there
remain mixed
⚫ Obtaining the concepts of an ontology is feasible
given the appropriate circumstances, but placing
them in the appropriate hierarchy with the right
mutual relationships remains a topic of active
research

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 Question 3: What should be done with
the many ontologies?

⚫ The Semantic Web crucially relies on the

possibility of integrating multiple ontologies
⚫ This is known as the problem of ontology
alignment, ontology mapping, or ontology
integration

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 Question 3: What should be done with
the many ontologies? (2)

⚫ A wide array of techniques is deployed for

solving this problem
– Ontology-mapping techniques based on natural
language technology
– Machine learning
– Theorem proving
– Graph theory
– Statistics

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 Question 3: What should be done with
the many ontologies? (3)

⚫ Although there are encouraging results, this

problem is by no means solved
⚫ Automatically obtained results are not yet
good enough in terms of recall and precision
to drive many of the intended Semantic Web
use cases
⚫ Ontology mapping is seen by many as the
Achilles’ heel of the Semantic Web
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 Question 4: Where’s the "Web " in
Semantic Web?

⚫ Semantic Web has sometimes been criticized as

being too much about “semantic” and not
enough about “Web”
⚫ This was perhaps true in the early days of
Semantic Web development, when there was a
focus on applications in rather circumscribed
domains like intranets
⚫ The main advantage of company intranets is that
the ontology-mapping problem can be avoided

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 Question 4: Where’s the "Web " in
Semantic Web? (2)

⚫ Recent years have seen a resurgence in the

Web aspects of Semantic Web applications
⚫ A prime example is the deployment of FOAF
technology, and of semantically organized
P2P systems
⚫ The Web is more than just a collection of
textual documents

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 Question 4: Where’s the "Web " in
Semantic Web? (3)

⚫ Nontextual media such as images and

videos are an integral part of the Web
⚫ For the application of Semantic Web
technology to such nontextual media we
currently rely on human-generated semantic
markup
⚫ Deriving annotations through intelligent
content analysis in images and videos is
under way
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 Main Application Areas

⚫ Looking at industrial events, either dedicated

events or co-organized with the major
international scientific Semantic Web
conferences, we observe that a healthy uptake
of Semantic Web technologies is beginning to
take shape in the following areas :
– Knowledge management, mostly in intranets of large
corporations
– Data integration (Boeing, Verizon, and other)
– E-science, in particular the life sciences
– Convergence with Semantic Grid

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 Main Application Areas (2)
⚫ If we look at the profiles of companies active in this area, we
see a transition from small start-up companies such as
– Aduna
– Ontoprise
– Network Inference
– Top Quadrant
⚫ To large vendors such as
– IBM (Snobase ontology Management System)
– HP (Jena RDF platform)
– Adobe (RDF-based XMP metadata framework)
– Oracle (support for RDF storage and querying in their datavase
product)

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 Main Application Areas (3)

⚫ However, there is a noticeable lack of uptake

in some other areas. In particular, the
promise of the Semantic Web for
– Pesonalization
– Large-scale semantic search (on the scale of the
World Wide Web)
– Mobility and context-awareness
is largely unfulfilled

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 Main Application Areas (4)

⚫ A difference that seems to emerge between

the successful and unsuccessful application
areas is that the successful are all aimed at
closed communities, whereas the
applications aimed at the general public are
still in the laboratory phase at best
⚫ The underlying reason for this could well be
the difficulty of the ontology mapping

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 Lecture Outline

1. Which Semantic Web?

2. Four Popular Fallacies
3. Current Status
4. Selected Key Research Challenges

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 Selected Key Research Challenges (1)

⚫ Several challenges that were outlined in

2002 article by van Harmelen have become
active areas of research:
– Scale inference and storage technology, now
scaling to the order of billions of RDF triples
– Ontology evolution and change
– Ontology mapping

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 Selected Key Research Challenges (2)

⚫ A number of items on the research agenda, though

hardly developed, have had a crucial impact on the
feasibility of the Semantic Web vision:
– Interaction between machine-processable representations
and the dynamics of social networks of human users
– Mechanisms to deal with trust, reputation, integrity and
provenance in a semiautomated way
– Inference and query facilities that are sufficiently robust to
work in the face of limited resources (computational time,
network latency, memory, or storage space) and that can
make intelligent trade-off decisions between resource use
and output quality

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