The document discusses the need for a Semantic Web to address information overload on the current web. It explains that the Semantic Web aims to understand the meaning behind web pages by embedding semantics through techniques like RDF and microformats. This will allow computers to better understand and filter information, leading to a smarter online experience for users where they spend less time searching and viewing irrelevant content. Approaches to building the Semantic Web include bottom-up annotation of existing web pages and top-down extraction of entities from pages using natural language processing tools. Linked Data is seen as a key enabler of the Semantic Web by establishing linkages between data.

1. Moving From Noise to Signal Semantic Web

2. Agenda Introduction Semantic Web What is Semantic Web? Why it matters? How to Semantify the Web? Web 3.0 Linked Data

3. Introduction 1.3+ billion people connected to the web 2006 161 EB of information created/replicated (1 EB = 1 billion GB) Technical information doubled every 2 years By 2010 six times to 988Eb (approx = 1 ZB) Technical information will double every 72 hours Computers, mobile phones, intelligent devices Internet is broken – not one web – unable to communicate

4. Information Overload Is that really how the Web experience is supposed to feel? Key Problem – how to share meaning? Filtering, not aggregating. Not more, just smarter.

5. Semantics? Related to Syntax Syntax – How you say something (letters, punctuation, grammar) eg. HTML Semantics – Meaning behind what you say Example: I Love Technology I Technology

6. What’s the big deal? Internet std way to communicate Parrot – mimic w/o understanding The Web Store and retrieve docs on the internet syntax to display the doc (HTML) Search Engines Find any website that we want Life is good!!! Can we make it any better?? How??

7. The Answer – Semantic Web Understand the meaning behind webpages Web of Things vs Web of Documents Things can be ANYTHING – people, places, pets, events, music, movies, organizations…. Not only identify these things but also relationships (Human-like!!!) Embed semantics in html docs – microformats, RDF It’s not about the future…it’s about Today!!!

8. The Possibilities

10. Why Semantic Web? Spend less time searching Spend less time looking at things that do not matter Spend less time explaining what we want to computers Bottomline – improve the online experience!!!

11. Cartoon by Geek and Poke

12. It’s all about the noise… Web 1.0: Get (hear & see) ‘Noise’ Web 2.0: Make Noise Web 3.0: Filter the Noise Web 4.0: Going deaf….or SmartNoise

13. Semantifying the Web - Approaches Bottom Up Annotating information in web pages with machine readable tags Technical Challenges Representational Complexity How to create – manual/automatic? How much can be transformed? Standard Issue Business Challenges It’s primitive Consumer Value? How to market? Recent Wins: Yahoo search engine to support RDF, MF Dapper – automated annotation tool

14. Annotation Technologies Trade-off between simplicity and completeness RDF Graph based – things, attributes, relationships Precise but complex Triple Microformats Uses specific CSS styles Compact Embedded in HTML gaining popularity because of their simplicity Popular microformats: hCard: describes personal and company contact information hReview: adds meta information to review pages hCalendar: used to describe events Limitations no way to described type hierarchies somewhat cryptic, because the focus is to keep the annotations to a minimum Flickr, Eventful, and LinkedIn

15. Semantifying the Web - Approaches Top Down Focused on leveraging information in existing web pages As – is NLP Tools (entity extraction) Calais & TextWise – APIs that recognize people, companies, places in docs Vertical Search Engines – ZoomInfo, Spock & Retrevo Dapper, BlueOrganizer, ClearForest – recognize objects in web pages & annotate them Yahoo! Shortcuts, Snap, Smartlinks – recognize objects in text and links Challenges Not 100% perfect, has ambiguities May not scale well

16. Map+ add-on for Firefox vertical search engine Spock

17. More Annotations  Structured Web  More Precise Top-Down

18. Web 3.0 = Semantic Web = Linked Data Are They Equal??

20. Structured Data RDBMS Powerful and flexible Pre-defined relationships and usage of data Too constraining and too structured Schema changes are expensive Virtually impossible to make different DBs speak Linked Data Establish linkages at the data level(RDF) Bridges the gap between unstructured and structured data Does not add any semantic meaning to the information

21. Linked Data Medium for the semantic web It does not create smart data, only enables it Relies on clean, granular, structured data Pre-Structured Pre-Connected

22. Further Reading RDF, OWL, Microformats, FOAF Linked Data Semantic APIs