The Semantic Web (and what it can deliver for your business)

The Semantic Web (and what it can
deliver for your business)
Knud Möller, DERI and Social Bits

 Copyright 2010 Knud Möller
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://www.socialbits.net/

Monday 29 March 2010

About me (in plain text)

•Knud Möller
•Web and Semantic Web researcher at DERI by day ...
•... consultant for SocialBits at night!
•PhD from NUI Galway on “Lifecycle support for Data on
the Semantic Web”
•involved in the W3C RDFa Working Group
•Website: http://kantenwerk.org
•LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/knudmoeller
•I’m not on Twitter...

The Semantic Web (and what it can deliver for your business) 2


About me (as a graph)

foaf:Online
foaf:Person swrc:Phdthesis
Account
http://
www.linkedin.com http://
/in/knudmoeller kantenwerk.org df:deri-nui-
a
a a galway
foaf: foaf:homepage
foaf:homepage depiction swrc:school

foaf: foaf:
:linkedin :me :phd_thesis
account made

foaf:account foaf:workplace dcterms:subject
foaf:workplace
ServiceHomepage Homepage
Homepage
foaf: dcterms:title
accountName foaf:name http:// category:
http:// www.socialbits.net Semantic_Web
http://
www.deri.ie
www.linkedin.com
Lifecycle Support for
knudmoeller Knud Möller Data on the
Semantic Web



About me (in RDF code)

:me a foaf:Person ;
foaf:name “Knud Möller” ;
foaf:workplaceHomepage <http://www.deri.ie> ;
foaf:Online
foaf:Person swrc:Phdthesis
Account
foaf:workplaceHomepage <http://www.socialbits.net> ;
http://
foaf:made
www.linkedin.com :phd_thesis ; http://
/in/knudmoeller kantenwerk.org df:deri-nui-
a
foaf:homepage <http://kantenwerk.org> ;
a a galway

foaf:account :linkedin ; foaf: foaf:homepage
foaf:homepage depiction swrc:school
foaf:depiction <http://kantenwerk.org/images/talk_isemantics.jpg> .
foaf: foaf:
:linkedin :me :phd_thesis
account made
:linkedin a foaf:OnlineAccount ;
foaf:account foaf:workplace dcterms:subject
foaf:accountName “knudmoeller” ;
foaf:workplace
Homepage
ServiceHomepage Homepage
foaf:homepage <http://www.linkedin.com/in/knudmoeller> dcterms:title
foaf: ;
accountName foaf:name http:// category:
foaf:accountServiceHomepage <http://www.linkedin.com> .
http:// www.socialbits.ie Semantic_Web
http://
www.deri.ie
www.linkedin.com

:phd_thesis a swrc:Phdthesis ; Lifecycle Support for
knudmoeller Knud Möller Data on the
dcterms:title “Lifecycle Support for Data on the Semantic Web” ;
Semantic Web

swrc:school df:deri-nui-galway ;
dcterms:subject category:Semantic_Web.



Some things I want to talk about today

•What is the Semantic Web?
•What are some of the buzz words and what do they
mean?
•Are there any serious players involved in the Semantic
Web right now?
•Who are they and what do they do?
•What can businesses do today with the Semantic Web
and how can it beneﬁt them?
•What might happen in the next few years in the ﬁeld?



UK to spend £30.000.000 on SW Research

22/03/2010



Buzz words in Gordon Brown’s speech




“Next Generation of the Web”
aka “Semantic Web”
aka “Web of Linked Data”




disruptive for
business




disruptive for
business

documents/ﬁles
vs.
data/information




disruptive for
business

direct answers
to
direct requests documents/ﬁles
vs.
data/information




disruptive for
business

“Web Science”

direct answers
to
direct requests documents/ﬁles
vs.
data/information



Semantic Web: The General Idea

•Today’s Web is the “Eyeball Web” - a web of
interlinked documents and services that are made for
humans to see and interact with.
•The Semantic Web is a web of interlinked data, in
formats that software agents can make sense of.
•The Semantic Web does not replace our current Web - it
will extend it.
•The Semantic Web will be (and already is) under the
hood of the current Web and make it smarter.
•It’s the next generation, but it will probably look the
same.



Documents vs. Data

Document

Data



The idea is not completely new...*

Memex (Vannevar Bush)
A memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his
books, records, and communications.”

Open Hypertext System
(Doug Engelbart)
“The open hyperdocument system (OHS) is a standards-
based, open source framework for developing
collaborative, knowledge management applications.”

WWW (Tim Berners-Lee)
“There was a second part of the dream […] we could
then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of
what we re doing, where we individually ﬁt in, and how
we can better work together.”



But the time wasn’t right*

*original slides from http://www.stefandecker.org/ﬁles/2006/cweeurope.ppt



Now it probably is

The ingredients are there:
•the internet and the WWW, a globally interconnected
information network
•fast computers
•enormous data storage
•representation standards
•methods for automatic information extraction (NLP, ...)
•“digital natives”



Linked Open Data

•for a long time, the Semantic Web community focussed
on logics, ontologies and stand-alone use-cases
•however, without massive amounts of actual instance
data, we won’t get anywhere
•individual datasets need to be linked to each other
(that’s the hard part), otherwise we have isolated
islands



Linked Open Data (ctd.)

•The Linked Open Data cloud - the set of interlinked,
Semantic Web datasets - is growing rapidly

February 2008

July 2009



Who is using SW Technology now?

• Companies using or producing semantic data, e.g.
– Google (enhanced search results based on RDFa)
– Yahoo! (enhanced search results based on RDFa)
– Tesco (product pages enriched with RDFa)
– BestBuy (semantic descriptions of shop locations)
– O’Reilly (semantic descriptions of book catalogue)
– Adobe (embedded RDF annotations of documents)

• Companies doing business in Semantic Web, e.g.
– OpenLink Software (Virtuoso Triple Store)
– Talis Group (Talis Platform)
– TopQuadrant (TopBraid Composer)
– Metaweb (Freebase)



Who is using SW Technology now? (ctd.)

Improved Search Results in Yahoo!




•Governments, e.g.
– UK public sector data at http://data.gov.uk
– US open government data at http://www.data.gov (not quite
Semantic Web, but close)
– more at http://linkeddata.deri.ie/node/72

•Research prototypes, e.g.
– Sindice and Sig.ma (a “semantic Google”) at DERI:
– http://sindice.com/

•more examples at
– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/



How can all this affect businesses?

•Business Intelligence
– easier to harvest and analyse data from competitors
– easier to do integrated querying of different data sources
(population data, product data, political data, etc.)
•Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
– BestBuy experienced 30% trafﬁc increase after adding semantic
metadata
– Yahoo! reported higher click-through rate for search results with
semantic metadata
•Reduced Costs
– Gordon Brown: savings of over £20bn in public sector?
– improved communication, collaboration through technologies such
semantic desktop, semantic ofﬁce



How can all this affect businesses? (ctd.)

•New forms of businesses, e.g.
– new kinds of services
– data handling: extract, maintain and link data
– applications around linked data
– specialised search engines for speciﬁc domains
– ensuring data security, evaluate trustworthiness of sources
(authority)
•Consumer Pull
– consumers will specify what they want and match with offers
– contextualised, personalised advertisement (only offer products
and services that the consumer wants)



Linked Data Business Models

Scott Brinker, http://www.chiefmartec.com/2010/03/business-models-for-linked-data-and-web-30.html



The Semantic Web - Under the Hood

RDF Principles of
Linked Data
URI

RDFa Vocabularies
and Ontologies

Datasets Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkay/3393069595/
© Copyright 2009 John Krzesinski
This work is licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en



URIs - Unambiguous Names for Things

•URIs are Uniform Resource Identiﬁers
•You know them from your Web browser - “these names
for things that start with ‘http’” (mostly)
– (Tim Berners-Lee talk at TED2009)

ambiguous unambiguous
Apple Apple, the fruit
Apple Apple, the computer company
“Java in a Nutshell” “Java in a Nutshell”, 5th edition
“Java in a Nutshell” “Java in a Nutshell”, 3rd edition
to have a title to have a title, such as the title of a book
to have a title to have a title, such as “Prof.” or “PhD”



URIs - Unambiguous Names for Things

•URIs are Uniform Resource Identiﬁers
•You know them from your Web browser - “these names
for things that start with ‘http’” (mostly)
– (Tim Berners-Lee talk at TED2009)

ambiguous URIs
Apple http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

Apple http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.

“Java in a Nutshell” urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596007737.IP

“Java in a Nutshell” urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9781565924871.IP

to have a title http://purl.org/dc/terms/title

to have a title http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/title



RDF - Resource Description Framework

•If the Semantic Web had a language, RDF would be its
grammar
•The main rules of the grammar:
– every sentence has three words: subject, predicate and object
– instead of English words, use unambiguous URIs for words (also
called resources)
•a sentence in RDF is also called a triple or a statement
•RDF lets you say “anything about anything”

Knud’s homepage is at http://kantenwerk.org.
Knud’s full name is “Knud Möller”.




grammar
called resources)

human-understandable




grammar
called resources)

human-understandable
<http://kantenwerk.org/knud> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/homepage> <http://kantenwerk.org>.
<http://kantenwerk.org/knud> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> “Knud Möller”.




grammar
called resources)





grammar
called resources)

machine-understandable




grammar
called resources)

machine-understandable
:knud foaf:homepage <http://kantenwerk.org>.
:knud foaf:name is “Knud Möller”.
Knud’s full name “Knud Möller”.




•lots of triples make up a graph
"Tom Heath"

foaf:name foaf:Person

dbpedia: rdf:type
Semantic_Web people:tom-heath

http://

foaf:topic
rdf:type
http:// foaf:maker

foaf:maker
data.semanticweb.org/
data.semanticweb.or http://
people:knud-

foaf:maker

foaf:name
data.semanticweb.org

conference/aswc-iswc/g/conference/aswc-
moeller
/conference/aswc-
iswc/2007/tracks/in-
people:knud-
moeller
"Knud Möller"

use/papers/795
2007/tracks/in-use/iswc/2007/tracks/in-
use/papers/795
papers/795 rdf:type swrc:title

rdfs:subClassOf
"Recipes for
swrc: Semantic Web
swc:Paper
InProceedings Dog Food - The
[…]"

Resource Statement Graph



SPARQL - Querying RDF

•language to query RDF graphs (“direct answers to direct
requests”)
•looks a bit like SQL

SELECT DISTINCT ?organisation ?employee WHERE {
?organisation a foaf:Organization .
?organisation foaf:member ?employee .
}

Find all organisations and their employees

SELECT DISTINCT ?employee WHERE {
org:deri-nuig-alway foaf:member ?employee
}

Find all employees of DERI



Vocabularies and Ontologies

•the words in the Semantic Web: its nouns, verbs and
adjectives, each as a URI
•grouped together according to topics and use cases
•usually types of things and relations (“Person”,
“Product”), not speciﬁc instances (“Brian Cowen”,
“iPhone 3GS”)
•use logic-based languages such as OWL and RDFS to
deﬁne the meaning of terms
– People and their relations:
•FOAF (Friend of a Friend), http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
– E-Commerce (businesses, products, offers, shops, ...):
•Good Relations, http://purl.org/goodrelations/



Vocabularies and Ontologies

– General purpose annotations (author, topics, dates, licenses, ...):
•DCMI Metadata Terms (Dublin Core)
•http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/
– Online Communities and Communication:
•SIOC (Semantically Interconnected Online Communities)
•http://sioc-project.org/
– Address and Contact Information
• vCard-RDF, http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf/
– Geo-locations:
•Geo Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/
– Events:
•RDF Calendar: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/
– ... and many more - or create your own!
– The beauty of RDF: you can mix all of those together as you like!



FOAF (Friend of a Friend)

{
Properties/Relations Classes/Types

Person :knud a foaf:Person
Organization :socialbits a foaf:Organization
OnlineAccount :linkedin a foaf:OnlineAccount
Project nasa:apollo11 a foaf:Project

name :knud foaf:name “Knud Möller”

{
mbox :knud foaf:mbox <mailto:dunken69@gmail.com>
homepage :knud foaf:homepage <http://kantenwerk.org>
knows :knud foaf:knows :ina
account :knud foaf:account :linkedin
accountName :linkedin foaf:accountName “knudmoeller”
member :socialbits foaf:member :knud

@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .



About me (in RDF code)

:me a foaf:Person ;
foaf:name “Knud Möller” ;
foaf:workplaceHomepage <http://www.deri.ie> ;
foaf:workplaceHomepage <http://www.socialbits.net> ;
foaf:made :phd_thesis ;
foaf:homepage <http://kantenwerk.org> ;
foaf:account :linkedin ;
foaf:depiction <http://kantenwerk.org/images/talk_isemantics.jpg> .

:linkedin a foaf:OnlineAccount ;
foaf:accountName “knudmoeller” ;
foaf:homepage <http://www.linkedin.com/in/knudmoeller> ;
foaf:accountServiceHomepage <http://www.linkedin.com> .

:phd_thesis a swrc:Phdthesis ;
dcterms:title “Lifecycle Support for Data on the Semantic Web” ;
swrc:school df:deri-nui-galway ;
dcterms:subject category:Semantic_Web.



Good Relations

Business Product
• Company Entity OrService • Car
• Shop • Book
• Restaurant • Consulting
• Person • Wafﬂes
• ... • ...



Good Relations

Offering

Business Product
• Company Entity OrService • Car
• Shop • Book
• Restaurant • Consulting
• Person • Wafﬂes
• ... • ...



Good Relations
BusinessEntity :waffle_company a gr:BusinessEntity .

{
LocationOfSalesOr :waffle_shop a
Classes/Types

ServiceProvisioning gr:LocationOfSalesOrServiceProvisioning .
ProductOrService
:maple_syrup_waffles a gr:ProductOrServiceModel .
Model
Offering :waffle_offering a gr:Offering .

UnitPriceSpecification :waffle_price a gr:UnitPriceSpecification .

TypeAndQualityNode :waffle_type_and_quality a gr:TypeAndQualityNode.
Properties/Relations

legalName :waffle_company gr:legalName “Super Waffles Ltd.” .

{
hasPOS :waffle_company gr:hasPOS :waffle_shop .

offers :waffle_shop gr:offers :waffle_offering .
:waffle_offering
hasPriceSpecification
gr:hasPriceSpecification :waffle_price .
hasCurrency :waffle_price gr:hasCurrency “EUR” .
:waffle_type_and_quality
typeOfGood
gr:typeOfGood :maple_syrup_waffles .
@prefix gr: <http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#> .



Good Relations
gr:LocationOfSales
OrService gr:Offering We sell tasty waffles with EUR
Provisioning maple syrup, only €2.99!

gr:has
a a rdfs:comment Currency

gr:has
:waffle_shop gr:offers :waffle_offering Price :waffle_price

enu
Specification

gr:legalName
M a gr:has
Currency
gr:includesObject Value
Super Waffles gr:UnitPrice
Galway Specification
2.99
gr:hasPOS
:waffle_type_and gr:amountOf
1
_quantity ThisGood
Super Waffles
a
Ltd.
gr:typeOfGood gr:TypeAnd
gr:legalName QuantityNode

:waffle_company
:maple_sirup_ The “Super Waffles Galway”
waffles
café of the “Super Waffles Ltd.”
a a rdfs:label chain sells waffles with maple
syrup for €2.99 a piece.
gr:ProductOr
gr:BusinessEntity Waffles with maple syrup
ServiceModel



Good Relations

:waffle_company a gr:BusinessEntity ;
gr:legalName "Super Waffles Ltd." ;
gr:hasPOS :waffle_shop .

:waffle_shop a gr:LocationOfSalesOrServiceProvisioning ;
gr:legalName "Super Waffles Galway" ;
gr:offers :waffle_offering .

:waffle_offering a gr:Offering ;
rdfs:comment "We sell tasty waffles with maple syrup, only €2.99!" ;
gr:hasPriceSpecification :waffle_price ;
gr:includes_object :waffle_type_and_quality .

:waffle_price a gr:UnitPriceSpecification ;
gr:hasCurrency "EUR" ;
gr:hasCurrencyValue "2.99" .

:waffle_type_and_quality a gr:TypeAndQualityNode ;
gr:amountOfThisGood "1" ;
gr:typeOfGood :maple_sirup_waffles .

:maple_sirup_waffles a gr:ProductOrServiceModel ;
rdfs:label "Waffles with Maple Sirup" .



Principles of Linked Data

•we have URIs, we have RDF - shouldn’t we be ﬁne now?
•not quite - in order for Linked Data to work, the
following principles should be followed:

1. Identify everything with a URI.
2. Use “http://” URIs - otherwise they
cannot be found!
3. Provide useful information at each URI.
4. Include links between datasets.



Principles of Linked Data

•we have URIs, we have RDF - shouldn’t we be ﬁne now?
•not quite - in order for Linked Data to work, the
following principles should be followed:

1. Identify everything with a URI.
2. Use “http://” URIs - otherwise they
cannot be found!
3. Provide useful information at each URI.
4. Include links between datasets. Bad URI!

urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596007737.IP



Data Hubs: DBpedia, Freebase & Co.

•Linked Datasets providing a massive amount of instance
data, covering many domains
•URIs in these datasets can function as common names for
things
•Complementing ontologies and vocabularies (the types
of things and relations)

– http://dbpedia.org/resource/Republic_of_Ireland
– http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brian_Cowen
– http://dbpedia.org/resource/Volkswagen
– http://dbpedia.org/resource/1969



Data Hubs: DBpedia, Freebase & Co.

•DBpedia:
– complete mirror of all Wikipedia data “as is”
– facts and relations extracted and represented as linked RDF
– Semantic Web technology from the ground up
– not-for-proﬁt, community-based

•Freebase:
– also partially based on Wikipedia, but adapted
– export as RDF possible, but not very linked data-friendly
– commercially developed by Metaweb, but can be used freely (CC-
BY license)



RDFa - Embedding RDF in Web Pages

•Problem: we have the data, but what’s the best way to
publish it and put it online?
•Options:
– Just put a ﬁle with RDF in it online:
•http://kantenwerk.org/metadata/foaf.rdf
– A method called “content negotiation”:
•start: http://dbpedia.org/resource/National_Asset_Management_Agency
•web server ﬁgures out if a normal HTML page or RDF is wanted
•http://dbpedia.org/page/National_Asset_Management_Agency (HTML)
•http://dbpedia.org/data/National_Asset_Management_Agency.rdf (RDF)
– put RDF inside the HTML Web page (embedded RDF):
•RDFa has emerged as standard for this



RDFa - Embedding RDF in Web Pages (ctd.)

•technically easy:
– no twiddling with server necessary
– many platforms allow you to publish HTML snippets (within limits)
•human-readable data (HTML) and machine-
understandable data (RDF) are always in sync
•getting a lot of attention and uptake (more than anything
else on the SW before), e.g.
– Google + Yahoo! (read RDFa)
– BestBuy (uses GoodRelations e-commerce ontology)
– Tesco (uses Yahoo! products vocabulary)
– O’Reilly (uses GoodRelations and other ontologies)
– Drupal (RDFa built starting with version 7)




<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-
rdfa-1.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My Homepage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>About me</h1>

<p>Hi! My name is
John Doe, and
this is my <b>lovely wife</b>,
Mary Jane Doe.
</p>

<img
src="http://missmba.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/marge-simpson1.jpg"/>
</body>
</html>




<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-
rdfa-1.dtd">
<html xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<head>
<title about=”” property=”dct:title”>My Homepage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 about="">About <span rel="foaf:primaryTopic" resource="#me">me</span></h1>

<p about="#me" typeof="foaf:Person">Hi! My name is
<span property="foaf:name">John Doe</span>, and <span rel="foaf:knows">
<span about="#jane" typeof="foaf:Person">this is my <b>lovely wife</b>,
<span property="foaf:name">Mary Jane Doe</span></span></span>.
</p>

<img resource="#jane" rev="foaf:depiction"
src="http://missmba.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/marge-simpson1.jpg"/>
</body>
</html>




•For the adventurous: try out RDFa
•go to http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/
•enter URI of example web page:
•http://kantenwerk.org/downloads/rdfa_example.html
•Output format: “Turtle”
•Go!




•Even more adventurous: try this with some “real-life”
RDFa
– http://stores.bestbuy.com/1895
– http://www.clothingattesco.com/menswear/Onebody-Ski-gloves/
invt/ew921763
– http://fast.morfeo-project.eu/workshops/ugs2009/



Thank you for your patience!



References

• Social Bits: http://www.socialbits.net
• DERI: http://www.deri.ie
• Siegel, David (2009). “The Power of the Semantic Web to
Transform your Business”. Portfolio.
• “Cloud of Data” - Paul Miller’s blog and podcasts.
http://cloudofdata.com
• Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the Web of Linked Data @ TED2009 -
http://www.ted.com/talks/
tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
• Video: Gordon Brown on UK’s digital future, March 2009 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tNkRkPPmOE



References (ctd.)

•W3C RDFa Parser (to try out RDFa):
– http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/
•Google and Rich Snippets (RDFa):
– http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?
answer=99170&cbid
•Effect of RDFa for BestBuy ranking in Google:
– http://priyankmohan.blogspot.com/2009/12/online-retail-how-best-
buy-is-using.html
•Effect of RDFa in Yahoo search results:
– http://www.ysearchblog.com/2009/08/28/see-more-searchmonkey/



References (ctd.)

•Linked Data Business Models:
– http://www.chiefmartec.com/2010/01/7-business-models-for-linked-
data.html
•Example of BestBuy page with RDFa (try in RDFa parser)
– http://stores.bestbuy.com/1895
•Example of Tesco page with RDFa:
– http://www.clothingattesco.com/menswear/Onebody-Ski-gloves/invt/
ew921763
•List of open governmental datasets:
– http://linkeddata.deri.ie/node/72



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