Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T09:17:37.292Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - The Semantic Web and the RDF language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2014

Péter Szeredi
Affiliation:
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Gergely Lukácsy
Affiliation:
Cisco Systems, Ireland
Tamás Benkő
Affiliation:
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland
Get access

Summary

The present chapter introduces the Semantic Web and its philosophy. This involves two main ideas. The first is to associate meta-information with Internet-based resources. The second is to reason about this type of information. We show how these two ideas can help in solving the problems mentioned in the previous chapter.

Having introduced the main concepts we continue the chapter by describing technologies that can be used for representing meta-information in a uniform way. First we introduce the XML language, which forms the basis of the Semantic Web as a standard information exchange format. Then we describe the RDF language; this has an XML notation as well as other representations and can be used to associate meta-information to an arbitrary resource. By doing this we can extend web contents with computer-processable semantics.

Subsequently, we introduce the RDF schema language, which provides the background knowledge that is essential to do reasoning on meta-information. We discuss the similarities and differences between RDF schemas and traditional object-oriented modelling paradigms.

We conclude the chapter by presenting several applications that directly or indirectly use RDF descriptions during their operation.

Introduction

The Semantic Web approach was originated by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web and related technologies (URI, HTTP, HTML etc.). The approach is based on two fundamental ideas.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Semantic Web Explained
The Technology and Mathematics behind Web 3.0
, pp. 52 - 121
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×