XML, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, RDF, OWL, SPARQL

Web Services
Purpose
 Allows apps to communicate across platforms/languages
 Reduces development time and makes connectivity easier
Components
 XML* uses hierarchical tags to encode and decode data
 SOAP is used to transport data over HTTP
 WSDL is used to locate and describe Web services
 UDDI is used to register and search for Web services
*XML is a common format for exchanging structured data

Web Services Components
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)
 Platform independent directory of descriptions for web services
 Standard way to publish and discover Web services and providers
 Supports many types of service descriptions, not limited to WSDL
 UDDI registrations can be generated from WSDL descriptions
Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
 XML markup for describing services available on a network
 Describes the interface, protocol bindings, and service deployment
 Provides a uniform way of describing UDDI abstracted services
 Web services are network endpoints that operate on messages

Semantic Web
Purpose
 Adds metadata to existing data on the web
 URIs and RDF used to associate documents
 Machine oriented, not like Web 2.0 social/people oriented
Benefits
 Machines can better process and aggregate data
 Allows data from multiple sources to be combined
 Converts collection of pages to a single virtual data store

Resource Description Framework
RDF Description
 Framework for describing data, metadata, and information
 Used to convert basic Web page data into structured data
 Combines data from Web pages, applications, and databases
 Enables apps to exchange machine-understandable content
Metadata Examples
 Title
 Author
 Modification date
 Copyright notice
 Licensing information

RDF Components
Triple
 Consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object
 Asserts the relationship type between subject and object
 The subject is an RDF URI reference or a blank node
 The predicate, or property, is an RDF URI reference
 The object is an RDF URI reference, a literal, or blank node
Graph
 An assertion for a collection of triples
 Displays the underlying structure of an RDF expression

RDF - Related Technologies
Web Ontology Language (OWL)
 Markup language for sharing concepts and their relationships
 Extends the vocabulary of Resource Description Framework
 Used to express concepts, meanings, and semantics
 Part of the W3C recommendations for the Semantic Web
 Used to represent machine-understandable content on the Web
Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL)
 Standard query language and data access protocol for RDF
 Focuses on what users want to know rather than on data format

Microformats
Description
 Web-based approach to semantic markup
 Supplement existing tags to add metadata and other attributes
 Used to add semantics to existing web content
Benefits
 Allows data intended for end-users to also be processed by software
 Enables data to be indexed and cross-referenced so it can be combined
 Reduces the need for natural language processing and screen scraping
RDFa
 Adds machine-readable tags to existing human-readable markup
 Tags can be interpreted by browsers and other programs

Why Semantics?
Semantic SOAs
 Automated document classification
 Automated site and blog monitoring
 Workload reduction from information correlation
Semantic Search Engines
 Searches based on concepts and natural language queries
 Content analysis used to determine the meaning of the query
 Queries return items within a defined context
 Keyword groupings, inbound links, and clickthroughs not analyzed
Example
 Hakia - Semantic and natural language -based search engine
 Librarians review “credible sites” for quality content free of commercial bias

Recommendations
Learn more about SOA and the Semantic Web
 http://dublincore.org/
 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/
 http://www.hakia.com/
Get involved
 http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php
 http://www.semantic-conference.com/

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