One of the ben­e­fits of the Semantic Web is to cre­ate vocab­u­lar­ies that relate to dif­fer­ent domains or knowl­edge areas.  These are just ways of group­ing or cat­e­go­riz­ing human knowl­edge and the kinds of things we dis­cuss, com­mu­ni­cate and share.  These exist in var­i­ous pro­fes­sions, in games, hob­bies and more.  It is the way we under­stand the world… the assump­tions we make… the way we com­mu­ni­cate.  While it is true that the Semantic Web has a goal of enabling com­put­ers or the soft­ware that makes up the inter­net and the web, to under­stand or com­mu­ni­cate the mean­ing of what exists on the web, what we are describ­ing are real things in the world. 

On the Semantic Web, a vocab­u­lary, also called an Ontology is a group­ing of terms and their mean­ing.  It is impor­tant if the web is going to be a giant global data­base of infor­ma­tion, that we decide on com­mon vocab­u­lar­ies for describ­ing things in the world – peo­ple, places, ideas, con­cepts and other things – and the way they relate to one another. 

All this knowl­edge can be stored in RDF files – Resource Descriptive Framework.  It was decided by the Web Standards Committees at the W3.org that any­thing that can be described in the world will be called a resource.  This includes peo­ple, objects, places, ani­mals and so on.  Using RDF we rep­re­sent infor­ma­tion in the form of triples – sub­ject, pred­i­cate, object.  I think this is very sim­i­lar to the way we would dia­gram sen­tences back in Elementary School.  Using RDF on the Semantic Web, we have a con­sis­tent for­mat for stor­ing infor­ma­tion in what are called triple stores (a store is a data­base of information). 

Let’s take an exam­ple, of Bruce Whealton “is mar­ried to” Elnaz.  The part in quotes is the pred­i­cate and it relates me, the sub­ject to Elnaz the object.  Then we might have mar­riage “date” November 11, 2010.  This relates the date of the mar­riage to November 11, 2010.  This lat­ter sen­tence might seem a bit awk­ward and if I might be able to phrase it a lit­tle dif­fer­ently so speak­ing of this, when try­ing to describe to oth­ers that I am express­ing a rela­tion­ship between the mar­riage and a date when it occurred. 

So, for Genealogy pur­poses, we can cre­ate RDF based data­bases that relate peo­ple to their ances­tors and to events in their lives and the lives of their ances­tors.  The FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocab­u­lary was cre­ated to describe peo­ple, their activ­i­ties (online and oth­er­wise) and their rela­tion­ships to one another.  As a stan­dard vocab­u­lary this does offer a start in that there are prop­er­ties for name, address, phone num­ber, email address, and much more.  However, for Genealogy pur­poses, we need to expand this and indeed there are two other vocab­u­lar­ies that already exist or are devel­oped by oth­ers that specif­i­cally pro­vide terms that we can use for Genealogy.  Using the BIOGRAPHICAL vocab­u­lary, abbre­vi­ated with BIO, we have terms for mother, father, as well as var­i­ous events in a per­sons life.  The BIO vocab­u­lary also sup­plies a term that can be used to relate to a bio­graph­i­cal state­ment which is either included directly in the file or is avail­able else­where.  I also dis­cov­ered the RELATIONSHIP vocab­u­lary, abbre­vi­ated REL, for describ­ing peo­ple and their rela­tion­ships.  This expands upon the FOAF vocab­u­lary, which is com­mon to do on the Semantic Web – to use exist­ing vocab­u­lar­ies, com­bin­ing them and extend­ing them.

With these vocab­u­lar­ies, I want to define an appli­ca­tion that will be used for stor­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing and devel­op­ing one’s geneal­ogy.  I am cur­rently look­ing at Protégé a Semantic Web tool devel­oped by Standford University and freely avail­able.  This tool can be used for work­ing with ontolo­gies, includ­ing defin­ing and dis­play­ing rela­tion­ships between terms in a visual fash­ion.  The terms are rep­re­sented as classes.  Individuals would be mem­bers of a class or classes.  In this way we can relate indi­vid­u­als.  It is impor­tant to think of indi­vid­u­als as not just peo­ple, as is the case in this exam­ple, but also things, places, events.  Instances of a class are known as Individuals.

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