The general aim of the “Linked Data” movement is that of popularizing the use of the Semantic Web techniques through the availability of large amounts of interlinked data in RDF format, where every RDF triple must be conceived as a hyperlink that can be followed by specific Linked Data browsers and crawlers. In particular, the Linking Open Data project aims at identifying datasets that are available on the Web under open licenses (such as Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, Geonames, Wordnet, and DBLP), at re-publishing these datasets in RDF format and at associating them with each other on the Web. Estimations about the size of the Web of Linked Data that stems directly from this effort amount to over two billion RDF triples, interlinked by around three million RDF links.
Published in Chapter:
RDF and OWL for Knowledge Management
Gian Piero Zarri (University Paris Est and LISSI Laboratory, France)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-931-1.ch130
Abstract
As Web-based content becomes an increasingly important knowledge management resource, Webbased technologies are developing to help harness that resource in a more effective way. The current state of these Web-based technology – the ‘first generation’ or ‘syntactic’ Web – gives rise to well known, serious problems when trying to accomplish in a non-trivial way essential management tasks like indexing, searching, extracting, maintaining and generating information. These tasks would, in fact, require some sort of ‘deep understanding’ of the information dealt with: in a ‘syntactic’ Web context, on the contrary, computers are only used as tools for posting and rendering information by brute force. Faced with this situation, Tim Berners-Lee first proposed a sort of ‘Semantic Web’ (SW) where the access to information is based mainly on the processing of the semantic properties of this information: “… the Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning (emphasis added), better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation” (Berners-Lee et al., 2001: 35). The Semantic Web’s challenge consists then in being able to manage information on the Web by ‘understanding’ its proper semantic content (its meaning), and not simply by matching some keywords.