MokaByte-SWP Frequently Asked Questions
Semantic
Web - Technical Issues
The Semantic Web
- What is the Semantic Web?
See 'Semantic Web' on our glossary
page.
- What it RDF?
See 'RDF' on our glossary
page.
- Why do we need the Semantic Web? and Why isn't Google good
enough?
The semantic web is often seen as being about finding information on
the web more effectively. Which, while it is an important part of the
goal, is not whole picture. Google and other search engines are very
effective in helping us find answers to specific questions and finding
web sites, for example, of major organisations or projects.
However there are limitations to traditional approaches - traditional
search engines visit web pages and index them using the words that are
contained in the pages. However they have no way of knowing what those
words 'mean' or in what way they were used (e.g. 'vessel' might mean
container, a sea going craft or blood vessel), even where the sense
is known, the manner of use of of terms can be ambiguous. And of course
names may refer to many different things, e.g. common human names (in
the UK Smith or Jones) and places e.g. "West Street".
Traditional web search engines cannot distinguish between these meanings,
uses or cases, because the information needed to do it (at least unless
read by a human) is simply not available within the web page. The semantic
web simply provides ways for authors of web pages and other web-based
information to embed such information within the web page so that computers
can 'known' what is being referred to. e.g. the Mr. Jones - with the
following e-mail address or the term 'vessel' as referred to by the
company 'boat builders inc.' or the place Bristol with the geographic
coordinates of ... etc.). Each term, relationship and name can be given
a unique identifier.
This 'disambiguation' means that not only can web searches be made more
precise in their construction (e.g. give me information about the place
''West Street' at location ...) and response (e.g. by giving only results
related to that place and ALL results related to that place that the
system knows of) but also allows information to be joined or integrated
in ways simply not possible previously. For example if one piece of
information contains tourist information about a place and another pictures
of that place, a computer program can easily pull those the two together.
In the context of SWED this could work for organisations and their publications,
their products or services or any other characteristic of them.
- Why is using RDF better than using straight XML?
If you know of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) you may know that it was developed to make it easy to share structured web-based (and other) information such as library or product catalogues, holiday bookings or other information that might be held in a database. XML provides a way for those sharing, known structured, information to pass it between applications and their computer systems, so that they can inter-operate (work seamlessly) with the each other.
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Technical Issues
- How can we create our own RDF file?
If you want to create your own MOKABYTE-SWP RDF file rather than use the MOKABYTE-SWP data creation form, probably the easiest way is to take the text of an existing MOKABYTE-SWP RDF file, like the one below, and use that as a template or simply replace the values in the text to those that you require. For a brief description of the MOKABYTE-SWP RDF file and a simple example see the semantic portals page.
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