The Semantic Web: A White Elephant or a New Hope for The Web?

Slide 1: The Semantic Web A White Elephant or a New Hope? Eran Toch Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Advisors: Dov Dori and Iris Reinhartz-Berger Specification and Analysis of Information Systems Spring 2005 1

Slide 2: Agenda 1. What is the Semantic Web? 2. Applications 3. The Problem with the Semantic Web 4. What we do + Demo 2

Slide 3: So, what is wrong with the current Web? 3

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Slide 5: Today, a Web of Documents 5

Slide 6: The Current Web <html> <head> <title>The Technion</title> </head> <body> Welcome to the Technion. </body> </html> URL: http://www.technion.ac.il HTML Document 6

Slide 7: Vision: A Web of Data The Semantic Web The Current Web HTML + URL By Tim Berners-Lee et al., Scientific American (2001) 7

Slide 8: Semantic Resource Humans Machines 8

Slide 9: How do we inject meaning? 9

Slide 10: A common agreement between parties 10

Slide 11: Ontology Knows • From the Greek onto: being and Writes -logy: theory • A common Resource Concept conceptualization of a domain Reads ? ! Knows 11

Slide 12: Example: Social Networks • Personal details (name, mail, location) • Organizations, networks • People you know (friends) • ... 12

Slide 13: FOAF Ontology Structure URL Agent has is a is a Image member has instance of has Email Organization Person lives Address knows is a is a instance of Technion Network Eran Company Worker Employee Ontology 13

Slide 14: OWL: Web Ontology Language FOAF FOAF Employee Competitor Ontology Ontology Eran 14

Slide 16: Example 1: Semantic Search 16

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Slide 18: Example 2: GoPubMed 18

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Slide 20: Example 3: Friend of a Friend 20

Slide 21: FOAF Entity 21

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Slide 24: Example 4: Semantic Web Service Composition 24

Slide 25: Get Get Members Address output input output input Agent has URL is a is a Image member has has Email Organization Person lives Address knows FOAF Ontology 25

Slide 26: I want an application that maps my friend’s homes User Agent Get Address Find Friends Map Addresses Web Services Pool 26

Slide 28: Lots of Academic Work • ISWC – International Semantic Web Conference • WWW – International World Wide Web Conference • ER – International Conference on Conceptual Modeling • SWUI – Semantic Web User Interfaces • ICWE – International Conference on Web Engineering And 30+ conferences and Workshops But with little impact on the real world 28

Slide 29: The Chicken and Egg Problem Killer Applications Semantic Data 29

Slide 31: What we have done • Approximate service composition – Flexibility / Precision – Ranking – Performance – Human perception • Tools – OPOSSUM – Liquid-Interface – Service-Crawler 31

Slide 32: Our Approach Ontologies Weak-semantics Content 32

Slide 33: Approximate Service Retrieval ? ? Get Address Find Friends Map Address p1 p2 p3 Web Services Pool 33

Slide 34: Approximate Query Evaluation input Map Address Address Map a given Longitude / Airport Latitude address output Business Map Query Performance 34

Slide 35: Recall-Precision Curve 1 0.8 Precision 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 Recall Opossum OWLS-MX Logic 35

Slide 36: Demo 36

Slide 37: Summary 1. The Semantic Web 2. Ontologies 3. Approximate reasoning • Lots of questions – What bothers you on the Semantic Web? – Can it work? – If it would work, would it be harmful? 37

Slide 38: Thank You  http://www.technion.ac.il/erant 38

Slide 39: Back 39

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