Introduction to the Semantic Web

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Introduction to the Semantic Web Alexandre Passant Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway DM110 – Emerging Web Media Week 7 – 02 Nov. 2009 © Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Agenda Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   What is the Semantic Web ? What for ?   From Documents to Data   URIs and RDF   To identify resources and define statements about these resources   Ontologies with RDFS/OWL   Shared semantics to improve interoperability between applications   Querying data with SPARQL   To make use of it and create new applications   NB: The upcoming lectures will cover related topics / subtopics 2 of XYZ

The initial Proposal (1989) Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html 3 of XYZ

… but so far … Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie ?? ?? ?? 4 of XYZ

… however … Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them. For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine- readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading. Tim Berners-Lee, 1st World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, May 1994 5 of XYZ

… so ? Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/when-presentation-849447 6 of XYZ

The Semantic Web is about Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Bridging the gap from a Web of Documents to a Web of Data   With typed objects and typed relationships: The Web as a giant decentralized database   Adding machine-readable meta-data to existing content   So that information can be parsed, queried, reused   Defining shared semantics for this meta-data   For interoperability between applications and for advanced purposes, such as reasoning   Enabling machine-readable knowledge at Web scale, making information more easy to find and process 7 of XYZ

A Bit of History Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Memex   1945 ! - Vannevar Bush   A memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications.”   Augmenting Human Intellect   1960 - Douglas Engelbart   “By ‘augmenting human intellect’ we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.” 8 of XYZ

More recently Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   SHOE   http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/   “SHOE is a small extension to HTML which allows web page authors to annotate their web documents with machine- readable knowledge. SHOE makes real intelligent agent software on the web possible.“ 9 of XYZ

The Semantic Web, right now Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Most standardisation work is done in the W3C   http://w3.org   The Semantic Web activity   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/   Various Incubator Groups, Working Group, Interest Group   SPARQL - http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/wiki/Main_Page   RDB2RDF – http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/rdb2rdf   RIF - http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/   HCLS - http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/   … 10 of XYZ

The Semantic Web stack Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie http://www.w3.org/2007/03/layerCake.png 11 of XYZ

URIs Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource as of RFC3986   URIs are used to identify everything in a unique and non-ambiguous way   Not only pages (as on the current Web), but any resource (people, documents, books, interests …)   A URI for a person is different from a URI for a document about the person, because a person is not a document !   Example   http://apassant.net/alex - myself   http://apassant.net - my homepage 12

Content-negociation Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   URI for resource, URI for documents   But documents made for people cannot be read by computers (the issue with the current Web)   Content negotiation   Provides a way, for a resource URI to redirect to the document describing that resource   Depending on who is accessing it –  Human-readable of machine-readable   Example   http://dbpedia.org/resource/Galway   http://dbpedia.org/page/Galway   http://dbpedia.org/data/Galway 13

RDF Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   URI represent resources   But how define things about these resources ?   RDF – Resource Description Framework   RDF abstract syntax, a data model: a directed, labeled graph based on URIs   RDF is not XML ! RDF/XML is only one of the multiple way to serialize RDF data (N3, RDFa …)   RDF is based on triples   <subject> <predicate> <object> . 14

RDF Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie @prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> . ! <http://example.org/dm110-semweb>! dct:title “Introduction to the Semantic Web” ; ! dct:author <http://apassant.net/alex> ;! dct:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web> .! 15

RDF serializations Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   RDF/XML   The most used, probably the most complex !   E.g. http://geonames.org/2988507/about.rdf   N3/Turtle   Easier to read for humans   E.g. http://dbpedia.org/data/Galway.n3   RDFa   Embeds RDF in XHTML, one page for humans and machines   E.g. http://apassant.net (browse source) 16 16 of XYZ

Ontologies Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   RDF provide a way to write assertions about URIs   But what about the semantic of these assertions   E.g. how can one know that http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows identifies an acquaintance relationship ?   Ontologies provide common semantics for resources on the Semantic Web   “An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.”   Developing ontologies for the Semantic Web   Main languages are RDFS (RDF Schema) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) 17 17 of XYZ

Ontologies Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Classes and properties   :Person a rdfs:Class .   :father a rdfs:Property .   :father rdfs:domain :Person .   :father rdfs:range :Person . 18 18 of XYZ

RDFS Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   RDFS defines classes, properties and subsumption relations between classes and properties   ex:Person rdfs:subClassOf ex:humanLiving .   ex:worksWith rdfs:subPropertyOf ex:knows .   Such relationships are used to infer new statements   :alex rdf:type ex:Person .   :Alex ex:worksWith :Axel .   Is enough to say that Alex is a humanLiving and knows Axel 19 19 of XYZ

OWL Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   OWL goes further than RDFS by introducing new axioms   Disjunction (e.g. person / document)   Transitivity (e.g. ancestor)   Symmetry (e.g. sibling)   Cardinality constraints (e.g. ancestor > 1)   OWL2 has just been standardized W3C and introduces a lot of useful features, especially for reasoning   Property Chains   parent + brother -> uncle 20 20 of XYZ

OWL2 Property chain example Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie ex:uncle rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty . ex:parent rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty . ex:brother rdf:type owl:ObjectProperty . [] rdfs:subPropertyOf ex:uncle; owl:propertyChain ( ex:parent ex:brother ). :alice ex:parent :bob . :bob ex:brother :joe . => :alice ex:uncle :joe . 21 21 of XYZ

Notable ontologies Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Social networks and social data   FOAF – Friend Of A Friend   SIOC – Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities   Software development   DOAP – Description Of A Project   BEATLE - Bug And Enhancement Tracking LanguagE   Comprehensive / Top-level   Yago (From Wikipedia)   OpenCYC   Taxonomies   SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organisation System 22

Zooming in: FOAF Ontology Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   A model to describe people and social networks   http://foaf-project.org   Concepts   Person, OnlineAccount, Document, etc.   Properties   name, homepage, holdsAccount, knows, etc. 23

FOAF in use Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Google Social Graph API   http://code.google.com/intl/fr/apis/socialgraph/   Uses FOAF information already there on the Web to find your contacts   http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ samples/findcontacts.html   E.g.: http://apassant.net –  http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ samples/findcontacts.html?q=http%3A%2F%2Fapassant.net –  Contacts found in various FOAF files that link to myself and to my profile 24

Which ontologies to use ? Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   SearchMonkey Vocabularies   http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/ profile_vocab.html 25

Which ontologies to use ? Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   How to Publish Linked Data on the Web   http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/ LinkedDataTutorial/ 26

Extending ontologies ? Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   What if existing ontologies are not enough for your needs ?   Create a new ontology   … or extend an existing one !   Ontologies can be extended in a decentralized way   E.g. you can create a subproperty of foaf:knows, “hasLecturer”, in your own ontology and publish it online   Open.vocab.org   A collaborative platform to manage ontologies   http://open.vocab.org 27

Warning: Domain and range Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Domain and range of properties in ontologies are descriptive, not prescriptive   :father rdfs:domain :Person –  Not only pre-defined Persons can be fathers –  But every father is a Person !   Consequence 1: One triple is enough to describe several informations   Consequence 2: Don’t use foaf:homepage for a shoe !   For details   Based on RDF semantics (Rule rdfs2)   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/ 28

Warning: Open World Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   The Open World Assumption   Might be complex to understand when coming from a RDBMS or OOP background   If a fact is not there, it does not means it is false   Bob’s father is Paul. Is Jim Paul’s father ? –  Cannot be answered unless usin cardinality constraints in the ontology (in OWL), e.g. a Person has only 1 father.   Is Axel speaking today ? –  Cannot be answered   Bob’s daughters are Alice and June. Has Bob 3 daughters ? –  Cannot be answered   In practice, most applications use close-world reasoning / querying 29 29 of XYZ

Creating RDF data using ontologies Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Overview of different methods:   Create RDF manually (using your favourite text-editor or Web-based interfaces)   Create XHTML+RDFa documents and use GRDDL transformation –  For both human and machines !   Use exporters / wrappers for existing service   Use applications that natively expose RDF data   Provide mappings from RDBMS to RDF data 30

Getting a FOAF profile Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Or how to give yourself a URI   Give yourself an identity on the Semantic Web   Create your FOAF file   http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic (requires hosting, e.g. your FTP space or uploaded via Drupal)   http://foafbuilder.qdos.com/builder/ (requires OpenID)   I already have an homepage, what about duplication of information ?   Use RDFa to embed RDF annotations in your homepage !   More on this topic in a few slides 31

Extend your FOAF profile Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   The foaf:knows property aims to represent social connections between people   :alex foaf:knows :axel .   … but it’s voluntary a weak relationship (no strongsemantics on why / how we know each other)   Going further with the relationship vocabulary   http://vocab.org/relationship/   Various properties can be used: colleagueOf, hasMet …   You can extend your FOAF file to add colleagues, co-workers, and use different properties for each of them   Useful for querying a particular type of relationship only 32

Defining personal interests Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Instead of modeling interests as plain-text strings, use URIs to describe them !   Since URI are unique and non ambiguous identifiers   Allows interlinking of various resources for advanced query purposes: “find all people that like movies directed by Tarantino”   Using the foaf:topic_interest properties   :me foaf:topic_interest :movie .   But … where to get these URIs ?   Sindice, the Semantic Web index, can be used to find URIs for a given concept   http://sindice.com 33

Defining personal interests Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie 34

Defining personal interests Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie 35

RDFa and GRDDL Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   GRDDL is a mechanism to transform any kind of XML to RDF   XHTML+RDFa is XML, hence GRDDL can extract it   Simply embeds RDFa annotations in your HTML code   Indexed by Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Google   Done via XSLT, available at http://www.w3.org/2008/07/rdfa-xslt 36

RDFa and GRDDL Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   The GRDDL Primer at http://www.w3.org/TR/grddl-primer/#scheduling shows the overall processing of XHTML+RDFa: 37

RDFa and GRDDL example Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   http://sdow2009.semanticweb.org 38

RDFa and GRDDL example Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   http://sdow2009.semanticweb.org   Browse source to check RDFa annotations 39

RDFa and GRDDL Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   http://sdow2009.semanticweb.org   Header contains prefixes and links to the GRDDL transformation 40

RDFa and GRDDL example Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   http://sdow2009.semanticweb.org   Webpage can be translated to native RDF/XML using an RDFa distiller - http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/ 41

Other example Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Adding RDFa in one’s profile   Need to define prefixes in the header, or include them in the markup   See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ 42

Wrappers for existing sources Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Creating and maintaining a FOAF file by hand can be a time-consuming task   How can we automatically get RDF data from existing sources ?   What about Web 2.0 services in which we already give lots of personal information ?   Most of them provide APIs to get structured information (JSON, XML …) about the user profiles, content, etc.   API to RDF wrappers can easily be implemented 43

Wrappers for Web 2.0 services Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Facebook wrapper   Generates a FOAF file from your Facebook profile   If you have a Facebook profile, then you can have a related FOAF file (and escape the Facebook walled-garden !)   http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mrowe/foafgenerator.html   Flickr wrapper   Generates FOAF + SIOC + links to geographical information (using geonames.org)   http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf 44

More RDF-ification services Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Translates many structured sources into RDF   URIBurner –  http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/ –  Open Source, C++ , Based on Virtuoso   Any23 –  Sindice sponsored –  Open Source, Java based   Swignition –  http://buzzword.org.uk/swignition/ –  Perl based   Triplr –  Purely syntactic, fast –  http://triplr.org 45

Native export of RDF data Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   CMS can expose RDF data natively using dedicated plug-ins   SIOC Export for Drupal: http://drupal.org/project/SIOC   Provide RDF export of each blog post –  http://apassant.net/blog/2009/03/07/call-suggested- features-sparql-working-group –  http://apassant.net/sioc/node/235   Using RDF autodiscovery feature in the HTML header –  So that RDF can be discovered when browsing HTML –  Semantic Radar: http://sioc-project.org/firefox   RDFa to be included in Drupal7 core ! –  http://groups.drupal.org/node/16597 –  100.000’s of RDFa-powered websites 46

Overview: SIOC for vBulletin Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie 47

Relational to RDF Mapping Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Relational data (RDB) is structured data and can be mapped to RDF straight-forward   Especially useful as various websites are back-ended by a relational database (e.g. MySQL in the previous Drupal lecture)   Main issues:   Closed-world vs. open-world modeling   Assigning URIs for entities (records)   Mapping language expressivity   For a state-of-the-art see http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/rdb2rdf/ RDB2RDF_SurveyReport.pdf 48

Relational to RDF Mapping Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Standardization   W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group 2008/2009   Upcoming W3C RDB2RDF Working Group   Current solutions (see state-of-the-art)   D2RQ –  http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/d2rq/ –  DBLP in RDF: http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/   OpenLink’s Virtuoso –  http://www.openlinksw.com/virtuoso/   Triplify –  http://triplify.org 49

SPARQL Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   RDF(S)/OWL useful to produce data   A need to query it   SPARQL   SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language   The “SQL” of the Semantic Web   FAQ   http://www.thefigtrees.net/lee/sw/sparql-faq   SPARQL Query Recommendation / tutorial   http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/   Currently under standardization for new features   http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/wiki/Main_Page 50

How it works ? Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Basic concept of Graph Pattern Matching   RDF data is graph data, SPARQL checks if the graph you are looking for belongs to the graph you are querying   Four different operators   SELECT, DESCRIBE, CONSTRUCT, ASK   Combined with the pattern you want to match and optional features (union, filters …)   A Protocol   To query RDF data using SPARQL endpoints via HTTP   Most of endpoints are associated with an RDF store   A place that stores RDF data and provides open access to it – e.g. http://dbpedia.org/sparql 51

Example of SELECT queries Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie “select persons older than 30” SELECT ?X WHERE { ?X a foaf:Person. ?X ex:age ?Y. FILTER (?Y > 30) } 52

Query DBPedia Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   The Semantic Web aims at creating structured data where there is only HTML data at the moment   Wikipedia: A great resource for humans, poor for machines   DBPedia – RDF version of Wikipedia   New kind of advanced queries   http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess#h28-5   People born in Berlin before 1900   German musicians born in Berlin   Etc …   The following queries can be run online   http://dbpedia.org/snorql 53

Example query 1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   People Born in Galway   Simple triple pattern   http://dbpedia.org/ontology/birthplace   Answer SELECT ?who! WHERE {! ?who ! <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/birthplace> :Galway .! }! 54

Example query 2 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Japanese name of Galway   Using the FILTER by LANG clause   FILTER(lang(?x) = “ja”)   Answer SELECT ?name! WHERE {! :Galway rdfs:label ?name .! FILTER (lang(?name) = “ja”) .! }! 55

Example query 3 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Irish cities at the east of Galway! 56

Example query 3 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   FILTER by type and comparison of coordinates   Answer PREFIX yago: <http://dbpedia.org/class/yago/>! SELECT DISTINCT ?place ?long WHERE {! :Galway dbpedia2:westCoord ?glong .! ?place rdf:type! yago:CitiesInTheRepublicOfIreland ;! dbpedia2:westCoord ?long .! FILTER (?long < ?glong) ! }! 57

Assignement Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Create a FOAF file   Define your social network (>3) using the relationships vocabulary and add some interests using DBPedia URI (>3)   Validate at http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/   Add the same information in your Drupal profile as RDFa   Check if it translates well using http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/   Some SPARQL queries over Dbpedia (based on the interests defined in your FOAF file)   Will send the list by e-mail   Deadline 16 November 58

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Introduction to the Semantic Web

by Alexandre Passant

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Introduction to the Semantic Web Presentation Transcript