Published November 17, 2011 | 
Image via Wikipedia
The Semantic Web Fascinates me and I hope you will find it interesting.
The World Wide Web was the first step in the direction of connecting humans, computers, and documents to one another. The World Wide Web has grown a lot since its inception, and it’s taken off in far greater success than anyone could have imagined or dreamed. But with this increase in data and information, and the people using it to enrich their lives, there is a dramatic need for a more intelligent web that can help people find the information they are looking for in the big mass of information that is out there. Google came along and made it easier for people to find information, but keyword extraction and keyword searching can only go so far.
The Semantic Web is the next step in the evolution of the web. The Semantic Web was a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web makes it easier for machines to understand what the documents are talking about. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no AI in Google. There is no fully-developed AI that can tell what a document is talking about like a human can. Machines can understand what documents are talking about more clearly with Semantics; semantics entail meta-data that is inserted into the document that helps the machine understand what the document is about. Semantics go beyond the keywords on the page.
The W3C is a shorthand acronym for the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is an international standards organization for the World Wide Web. The W3C created a data format so that there would be a common framework to share data across applications, organizations, communities, websites, and enterprises. The data format is called Resource Description Framework, or RDF as an acronym. What it means to share data across applications is that applications usually keep information to themselves, and they don’t interact with one another so it is hard to create meaning for different types of related data, for instance. Applications used to be designed to do just one thing, or handle one type of media, but the RDF idea makes it easy for applications to share data and help give context to content instead of having content trapped in applications. This new data format enables new vocabularies to be created that give meaning to data in ways that were never available before.
RDFa stands for Resource Description Framework — in attributes. RDFa enables attribute-level extensions to be added to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The metadata can then be carried in an XML language. Finding, sharing, and combining information is easy with open linked data. One of the cruxes of this new technology is open linked data.
An RDF triple store is a database built for the special storing of RDF-rich metadata. An RDF triple store can store billions of triples.
If all of this information seems confusing to you, you’re not alone. There are only a select number of companies that can effectively market your company with the semantic ideals outlined here. One of the premier companies for getting your business hooked into it so that it can be positioned primely for where the Internet is going, is Future Wave Designs. Future Wave Designs specializes in getting companies hooked into it so that you won’t miss the boat and can get ahead of your competitors in the process. It’s something that every company should take advantage of.
Related articles
- Connecting the Dots: A Semantic Web Primer (girlinthearchive.wordpress.com)
- Tutorial 4: Introducing RDFS & OWL (linkeddatatools.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published November 17, 2011 |
Image via Wikipedia
The Semantic Web Fascinates me and I hope you will find it interesting.
The World Wide Web was the first step in the direction of connecting humans, computers, and documents to one another. The World Wide Web has grown a lot since its inception, and it’s taken off in far greater success than anyone could have imagined or dreamed. But with this increase in data and information, and the people using it to enrich their lives, there is a dramatic need for a more intelligent web that can help people find the information they are looking for in the big mass of information that is out there. Google came along and made it easier for people to find information, but keyword extraction and keyword searching can only go so far.
The Semantic Web is the next step in the evolution of the web. The Semantic Web was a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The Semantic Web makes it easier for machines to understand what the documents are talking about. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no AI in Google. There is no fully-developed AI that can tell what a document is talking about like a human can. Machines can understand what documents are talking about more clearly with Semantics; semantics entail meta-data that is inserted into the document that helps the machine understand what the document is about. Semantics go beyond the keywords on the page.
The W3C is a shorthand acronym for the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is an international standards organization for the World Wide Web. The W3C created a data format so that there would be a common framework to share data across applications, organizations, communities, websites, and enterprises. The data format is called Resource Description Framework, or RDF as an acronym. What it means to share data across applications is that applications usually keep information to themselves, and they don’t interact with one another so it is hard to create meaning for different types of related data, for instance. Applications used to be designed to do just one thing, or handle one type of media, but the RDF idea makes it easy for applications to share data and help give context to content instead of having content trapped in applications. This new data format enables new vocabularies to be created that give meaning to data in ways that were never available before.
RDFa stands for Resource Description Framework — in attributes. RDFa enables attribute-level extensions to be added to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The metadata can then be carried in an XML language. Finding, sharing, and combining information is easy with open linked data. One of the cruxes of this new technology is open linked data.
An RDF triple store is a database built for the special storing of RDF-rich metadata. An RDF triple store can store billions of triples.
If all of this information seems confusing to you, you’re not alone. There are only a select number of companies that can effectively market your company with the semantic ideals outlined here. One of the premier companies for getting your business hooked into it so that it can be positioned primely for where the Internet is going, is Future Wave Designs. Future Wave Designs specializes in getting companies hooked into it so that you won’t miss the boat and can get ahead of your competitors in the process. It’s something that every company should take advantage of.
Related articles
- Connecting the Dots: A Semantic Web Primer (girlinthearchive.wordpress.com)
- Tutorial 4: Introducing RDFS & OWL (linkeddatatools.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published November 15, 2011 | Ok, Chapel HIll is about the least dangerous, least violent place I’ve ever been. It is made up of families, children but mostly the University Students, Faculty and Staff. This is just an unbelievable scene to see police with assault rifles on Franklin Street!!!
One hears Chants of “Shame.” and “Takes a lotta guts to pull an assault rifle on a little girl. Who do they serve — Well’s Fargo. Who do they Protect — Well’s Fargo.”
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
Police The Army of the Rich!!!
“Shame!!! Shame!!!”
Image via Wikipedia
A group from the Anarachist Book Fair (not entirely affiliated with Occupy Chapel Hill) decided they would occupy a building on Franklin St. that has been vacant for at least a decade. This building, known as the “Chrysler Building”, is used by its renter as a tax write off and left abandoned.
I happened to be grabbing dinner when I saw cops block off the street. I knew they were probably raiding this site so I headed down to see what was going on. I only had a cell phone with me so that is all I was able to shoot with. The Police raided with assault rifles drawn (which was clearly overkill). I didn’t capture the initial breach, but that apparently came with officers in a white unmarked vehicle. I am not sure if I agree with this group of protester’s tactics in taking the building, but the response was too much. They held it since yesterday prior to the raid which came in the 5pm hour.Related articles
- On the Chapel Hill raid (occupyblogosphere.wordpress.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 29, 2011 | This is quite an honor
There are many very talented web developers and web development teams that write applications that use these cutting edge technologies. I was working alone with a vision in mind and an idea. MediaWiki is the same software that runs Wikipedia.org the very popular online encyclopedia. However a wiki can be used for anything. Wiki comes from an Hawaiian word meaning quick. On Wikipedia one can edit almost any page (the exception being protected pages) without logging into the site. Or one can login and create or edit articles. Once you save your page it is immediately available on the internet. So, it is the quickest and easiest way to publish a web page or web content.
There are also some very simple formatting instructions or codes you can use to present your article or page. For example to make something a header you would surround it with one, two, three or four equal signs, like this ==My Level 2 Heading== where two == signs gives a level 2, one equal sign use a level one header and usually isn’t used because the title of the article on the page uses that level of heading, so it is reserved. There are many other editing markers that you can use and they are easy to find by doing a search for “edit mediawiki article” on a mediawiki wiki or on google or bing.
So, what is Semantic MediaWiki? I did say that my wiki was being recognized as the Semantic MediaWiki site of the month. This involves extensions to the software to allow a MediaWiki to become a Semantic Website or to enable many features of the Semantic Web. Some of these features may not seem all that useful if one doesn’t have any idea how this Semantic Data or information can be used on the Semantic Web, outside of what we are doing on our own website. The Semantic Web does create open-linked data/information that can be accessed, or queried across the world wide web. That is why they call it a global database.
In my wiki sites, which are about genealogy, I used some extensions that allow forms to be created for entering information into the website. Behind the scenes and hidden from the user is the code that gives meaning to this data or information that you enter into the form, meaning that can be used by machines or software. So, on a genealogy website, when you enter information about a person, you would want to list, spouse, father, mother, children, ancestors, and etc. Think of these as properties. You might want to ask who was John Smith’s wife back in 1850? If someone entered that information into the form, the software would have that encoded so that later this question can be asked.
The sites I produced are here: “Whealton Family Genealogy”: http://whealton.info/w/ and “My Family Lineage”: http://my-family-lineage.com/w/
Continuing, a Semantic web application allows questions to be asked later that were not originally considered when the application was created. This is very new. It also allows for a standard way of defining terms, or meaning in different knowledge areas, or areas of discussion. For example, I you were talking about who you know and what you do on the internet you would use the FOAF vocabulary – Friend of a Friend. Of course, these vocabularies must be defined somewhere. FOAF is defined or specified here. In the context of Genealogy, two other important vocabularies can be used, “BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information” which is defined here and “RELATIONSHIP: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people” which is defined here.
My two wikis use forms so that when you enter the name of a spouse, or father, or mother, the values are matched up with these vocabularies. This is an important way to define terms in a way that can be “understood” by computers. Software or computers can use this information contained in the vocabularies to understand, as it were, how terms relate to each other. Previously, computers had no idea what these terms meant or how they relate to other terms. Even when you were asking Google natural language type questions and it seemed that Google understood, it was only using pattern matching and the fact that two or more words appeared on the page together.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 25, 2011 | This video describes how to use the FOAF Semantic Web vocabulary and what a Semantic Web Vocabulary is. This is a continuation of other Semantic Web videos that I’ve shared as tutorial or how-to videos. More videos about the semantic web are available here:
http://futurewavedesigns.com/drupal7/training-videos-semantic-web
Visit this link to get your free profile published and linked with others:
http://futurewavedesigns.com/drupal7/get-free-profile-and-grow-your-network
FOAF — Friend of a Friend
FOAF is a Semantic Web Vocabulary used to describe people, their activities and their relationships to one another. It is becoming very popular for people who discover that others are doing this, to setup and publish on the web, their own FOAF profile. This vocabulary has served as the base from which other vocabularies have been extended. These other vocabularies will extend some of the terms used here as sub-Classes or sub-properties. I’ll explain that with examples, very soon.
So what is a vocabulary in this context?
For the Semantic Web, We deal with controlled vocabularies, which define terms and how they relate to each other. We have a hierarchy of Classes which each have properties. This is where you get the triples which relate the classes to the values of these properties. As an example:
A Person “has name” “Bruce Whealton”
This is a triple. Person is a class (I’ll demonostrate how to correctly write that with FOAF in a moment) and “has name” is the predicate with “Bruce Whealton” being the value. This would give this image if we were to present it as a graph:
We use a vocabulary to describe concepts that relate to a specific domain, or an area of knowledge… or simply to a set of concepts. Different fields and professions have vocabularies, such as the medical profession, or the legal profession, or online chat communities. We have terms that have relationships to one another. Through these relationships we find meaning. This is how we find meaning on the semantic web, through controlled vocabularies; And this is how we form Semantic Web databases, aka “triple stores,” because the data or information is stored in the form of triples.
FOAF concepts are prefixed with the letters foaf. Some examples are foaf:Person, which describes a person in the real world. foaf:name is a property of foaf:Person. Thus we get the triple foaf:Person foaf:name “Bruce Whealton”
which is a triple. It represents knowledge or information. It is an assertion that is stated explicitly. That will contrast with inferred knowledge which computers can discover or be programmed to display using “reasoners.” Much more can be represented with this vocabulary, FOAF. The full specification of FOAF is here. Much more can be represented with this vocabulary. We can represent our business or place of employment, where we went to school, our online chat ids, where we have accounts online, such as with facebook.com or linkedin.com, our websites and weblogs and more. One of the most important things we want to represent, is who we know.
foaf:knows
Using this property, we crawlers can discover foaf profiles by crawling from one profile to the next. Each profile will have links to the people that one knows, alone with links to web pages that describe those people, if possible, we link to the file containing the foaf profile of the person we know. Web crawlers, particularly, Semantic Web Crawlers, follow those links… You build your network through links within your foaf profile and the links to you in other profiles. Your foaf profile is stored in a file, typically, in RDF format, which was described earlier in my posts here, i.e. foaf.rdf
Image via Wikipedia
The FOAF logo is shown below.This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 24, 2011 | This video speaks for itself… the goal is to make it easier for people to publish semantic data on the semantic web. Visit:
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 23, 2011 | What does all this mean? Well, FOAF is an acronym for Friend of a Friend. It is a Semantic Web vocabulary for describing people, their activities and their relationships to one another. This allows you to describe yourself online and makes it easier to network with others, and grow your network.
Web crawlers, that build indexes for the search engines, can start at one FOAF profile and using the links that are in the form of foaf:knows, which describe who you know, a search engine crawler can move from one profile to the next following these links. It may become obvious that this is a great way to network yourself, your business, your organization, your books, publications and more.
Kasabi is a linked data marketplace. In my blog article “Introduction to the Semantic Web” I spoke about a giant global database. That is what the Semantic Web is all about, and linked data is one more way to describe some of the goals of the Semantic Web. Using standard formats for representing information, in web pages and in “triple stores,” which are “Open” databases, we are able to link data, aka knowledge, information, from one website, or database to another. Information can be shared and combined… Information can be discovered. In additional, we can make a smarter web by helping Search engines and similar tools of the Semantic Web to perform more accurate searches because now there is more information that they can use. This information is exposed in a standardized way that lets anyone across the web to discover the data, use the information, share the information, and link to it in various other ways.
This is the Semantic Web Dream of a Giant Global Graph. In the previous post mentioned above on my blog article “Introduction to the Semantic Web” I presented the information in the form of a graph. You have a triple represented by a subject predicate object. Bruce knows Elee. This can be graphed with ellipses for the subject and object and an arrow that represents knows and points from Bruce to Elee.
Kasabi is one tool that makes it easy to publish your data, the information or knowledge that you have… the assertions that you can make and that can add to the collected knowledge held on the web.
Image via Wikipedia
Related articles
- The Semantic Web Media Summit (theconferencecircuit.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 15, 2011 | This video continues an introduction to the Semantic Web. The idea of how data is stored in the Semantic Web framework was compared to the relational database model. The concept of ‘open-data’ was introduced. In an open-data model, the data is exposed as part of a global database, in a standardized way so that it can be combined with other data (information) and shared. The traditional relational database model embedded the meaning and the relationships in the software that runs on the server. You would have to know how the database was structured on any particular domain or website before you could use that data or information/knowledge. There was no standard way of encoding the meaning or the structure of the database. This meant that you had islands or silos of data or information and one website could not ask or use data that was on another website — unless a particular website happened to publish a way to interface with that database. Obviously no one is going to learn about how each of the millions of websites that have relational database back-ends are exposing their data.
The solution is to have a standard way of representing knowledge, data or information. This is the Resource Descriptive Framework (RDF). RDF allows for expressing explicit knowledge or explicit statements — later we will learn about how to infer more knowledge beyond what is explicitly stated. The RDF represents knowledge, information or assertions in the form of triples — Subject Predicate Object. This might be thought of in the same way as subject verb object, but that doesn’t fit in all instances. I might say “Bruce knows Jean.” That is a triple and it represents an explicit statement. Subject is Bruce, predicate is knows and object is Jean. I might also say “Person1 hasFirstName Bruce” and “Person1 hasLastName Whealton.” This is a way of expressing using two triples, two facts about me. I have a first name of Bruce and in the next statement, I state that I have a last name of Whealton.
This can also be represented in a graph format using ellipses and arrows.
Image via Wikipedia
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 15, 2011 | 
Image by dullhunk via Flickr
The Semantic Web Introduction. This video introduces the concept of the Semantic Web or Web 3.0. The video discusses the concept of Semantics, which deals with meaning, and compares that to Syntax, which is about structure in any form of communication. As an example, syntax would represent the grammar of written and oral communication. The Semantics represent the meaning of the communication. In the world of computers, or more specifically, the world wide web, semantics will deal with ways of communicating the meaning of what is contained on a web page in a way that computers can understand or use that information.
The Semantic Web is not just about representing meaning in web pages but also other ways in which meaning can be communicated across the web in a standard fashion or manner. This is enabled by syntax and standards. In later videos we will look at new standards for representing data as part of a giant global database or graph. This will involve RDF — the Resource Descriptive Framework and the notion of triples as a standard way to represent knowledge on the Semantic Web.
Related articles
- Semantic Web | David Kuhta (davidkuhta.com)
- Semantic web: a folio (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
- The Semantic web for dummies (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Published October 14, 2011 | This was a how-to video that was inspired by a need to explain to a client how to work with and edit files on her website. I had developed the website using Adobe Dreamweaver (see other posts for more information about Adobe Dreamweaver). The client had Adobe Dreamweaver and so she needed to download the files I had created so that she could work with them on her computer.
This post deals with setting up FileZilla FTP program for uploading and downloading files. That is to say, uploading files from your computer to the remote server where your website is hosted, and downloading from your remote server to your local computer.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs