Semantic Web Technologies in Software Engineering
THE SEMANTIC WEB
In the current Web, Web pages are intended for human consumption. The content is encoded in HTML which provides manly formatting information and makes it difficult for machines to access the semantics of the content. Natural language processing would be needed to do so. To overcome this limitation the SemanticWeb aims to make theWeb’s content machine-processable. Tim Berners-Lee et al. define the Semantic Web as an extension of the Web, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation [2].
Since the Semantic Web provides machine-processable information based on a formal semantics, data can be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries [11]. Therefore, two applications that support the same ontology are able to exchange data even if they were not meant to interoperate in the first place.
To bring the vision of the Semantic Web into being the research community came up with standards, W3C recommendations, development frameworks, APIs, and databases. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) [8] is the data-model for representing meta-data in the Semantic Web. RDF is domain independent in that no assumptions about a particular domain of discourse are made. It is up to the users to define ontologies for the user’s domain in an ontology definition language such as OWL [3]. An ontology formally describes the concepts found in the domain, the relationships between these concepts, and the properties used to describe the concepts.For querying RDF repositories, the W3C defined the query languages SPARQL [9].
Besides the Web, Semantic Web technologies have proven to be a useful means to enable the interoperation of software systems also in other domains such as the user’s desktop. Semantic Desktop Systems aim to interlink data from specialized desktop applications such as calendar, address book, and email client and provide integrated views on the user’s data. For example, the Semantic Clipboard [10] enables copy
and paste of semantically rich RDF data between desktop applications without losing the meaning of the data.
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