The Semantic Web Prof Enrico Motta Knowledge Media

The Semantic Web Prof. Enrico Motta Knowledge Media Institute The Open University

The World-Wide-Web • Huge information space and computing infrastructure • All the world knowledge and a huge number of services at your fingertips • Easy to publish information/services • Reasonable easy to locate resources (for humans - it is hard for machines)

The WWW Revolution • Combination of ease of publishing, hugeness and removal of physical barriers implies revolutionary, disruptive, society-changing technology • Examples – Napster – Baghdad blogger beats BBC, CNN, etc… – Old lady in Yorkshire sets up very successful business from isolated cottage… – 17 -year old kids become millionaires…etc, etc

So what next for the web? … • Current web primarily for human consumption – Hard to locate resources for machines – Hard to locate info across web pages (for both humans and machines) – published information not easily processable by machines – Limited possibilities for largescale interoperability and the provision of ‘smart’ functionalities

In a nutshell… • There is so much information out there, but current technology can do very little with it • And of course in the knowledge economy, access to the right information at the right time is a key competitive advantage

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KMi Semantic Web

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The Semantic Web • Huge, distributed markup • Statements about web resources and entities in the world • Formal, declarative, machine processable information • Markup based on shared ontologies, to enable interoperability between agents (both human and software)

So What? • Semantic Markup supports semantic search, based on meaning rather than keyword retrieval • Shared ontologies allow ‘conceptual interoperability’ • Conceptual interoperability enables the discovery, aggregation and use of information coming from multiple sites • Key is the use of formal, explicit, declarative, shared representations

Trends and Possibilities…. • Semantic web is not a fad…here to stay – Some visionary papers may seem a bit over the top but reality is that • Semantic web is growing more quickly than the web • Huge amounts of distributed semantic markup will become available within 3 -5 years • WWW has opened up huge new markets and removed geographical and marketing barriers • Semantic web will be about automating processes and achieving novel smart functionalities by leveraging machineprocessable contents

Example: Travel Industry • Now: Expedia’s strategy is based on providing holiday packages customizations at no extra cost • Future: Automatic travel agents interoperating in real time with huge numbers of heterogenous providers to provide customtailored travel packages

Example: Financial Sector • Now: Portfolio creation, management and customization slow and expensive • Future: Smart artificial brokers will outperform human brokers by being able to make use of large amounts of real-time data about financial products, environments and clients, to provide optimized, tailor-made financial portfolio for clients

Example: Music Industry • Now: Digital music, ‘smart’ playlists, podcasting… • Future: All music ever created available online and massively marked-up. Huge possibilities for intelligently customized radio stations, for automated clearance of copyrights, etc. .

Conclusions • The semantic web is about producing massive amounts of distributed semantic annotations making explicit and formal what is implicit and informal • The availability of large scale semantic markup opens up the way for – Intelligent aggregation of information – Smart search engines able to reason about information coming from different sources, thus generating new knowledge – Dynamic agent interoperability on the web – Intelligent personalization of information